Editorial
The helpless women in Faridpur and Brahmanbaria
Let the law go after those who humiliated them
THE men who raped a young girl in Faridpur recently and had the scene recorded on video and distributed in public have not yet been hunted down. This is inexplicable failure on the part of the police. Are we then to suppose that because the scandal has centered around a poor family it is all right to ignore the matter and pretend that it will be forgotten soon? It has been days since the incident took place and yet the local administration has seen little reason to move against the accused. On top of that, the police kept the victim's father confined at the police station in Charbhadrashon for fifteen hours after having picked him up to identify the houses of those who had allegedly raped his daughter. The situation has now come to a point where the father of the victim is now in fear of the police. And, of course, there is the shame that hangs over his poverty-stricken family.
As if this humiliation were not enough, we now have reports of yet one more woman falling prey to a so-called fatwa in a village in Brahmanbaria. She has alleged that an uncle of her expatriate husband, having failed to lure her with his advances, arranged to humiliate her through forcing one of his accomplices into her home at night and then raising a hue and cry about her 'immodesty'. That led to a salish, or village arbitration, which decided in its absolute insensitivity to punish the woman with a hundred and one lashes of the whip. Predictably, the man who had entered the woman's home went scot-free. A relatively comforting aspect of this sordid episode is the courage the woman has demonstrated by filing a case against her husband's uncle and his accomplices. All but one of the accused are on the run, which only strengthens the argument that unless all of them are in the net, the woman will run the risk of seeing her stigma lead to her being ostracized by her neighbours. With all the outcry about violence against women going on around the country, it is only proper that the case be taken up by the administration and citizens as a whole in the interest of the law and decency. Similar must be the approach in the matter of the rape of the young girl in Faridpur.
There is little question that young women are these days falling victim to sex-related crime in the rural regions. The problem lies in the fact that not many women are willing to come forward and report such incidents owing to the embarrassment that might be caused to their families. And yet it must be the job of the law enforcers to go for tough action against those guilty of these crimes. In the present circumstances, the young men who have humiliated the girl in Faridpur and the men who convened the salish in Brahmanbaria, especially the cleric of the local village, must be swiftly rounded up and dealt with under the law. These criminal elements deserve no sympathy.
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