Tanzina Fardoush
Oniket Research Group
Bangladesh has a crisis it does not discuss loudly enough. Rape and child sexual abuse are not rare aberrations in the social order. They are pervasive, systemic, and deeply rooted in the combined failures of law, culture, and governance. Despite legislative activity in recent years, the conviction rate for rape in Bangladesh remains below one percent. Most survivors never report the crime at all. Children are exploited in brothels, in homes, in schools, and increasingly online, while the legal and social frameworks meant to protect them remain fragmented, underfunded, and frequently unenforced. Reform is not optional; it is urgent.
The Illusion of Tough Law
In 2020, Bangladesh amended its Women and Children Repression Prevention Act to introduce the death penalty for rape, responding to widespread public outrage over a series of high-profile gang rapes. The government presented this as a decisive step. It was not. Research consistently demonstrates that harsher maximum sentences, in the absence of a functioning justice system, reduce the likelihood of conviction rather than increase it. When judges, juries, and witnesses understand that a guilty verdict carries the death penalty, the threshold for certainty rises, and the accused more often walks free. Justice that almost never arrives is no deterrent at all.
What Bangladesh needs is not a harsher maximum penalty. It needs a far higher minimum rate of accountability. That requires attention to the machinery of justice itself: police training, forensic infrastructure, victim support, and case management. Currently, only around three to four percent of cases filed under the Act reach a courtroom. Reforming this pipeline, from the moment a survivor attempts to report an assault to the moment a verdict is reached, is the foundational legal task.
Redefining Rape in Full
Bangladesh’s legal definition of rape has historically been narrowing, gendered, and exclusionary. Recent amendments have made progress by replacing male-only perpetrator language with gender-neutral terms, and by extending certain protections to male children. But critical gaps remain. Marital rape is still not recognised as a criminal offence under Bangladeshi law, leaving married women, particularly those in child marriages, without recourse against sexual violence perpetrated by their husbands. Boys above the age of sixteen remain without meaningful legal protection under rape statutes. Gender-diverse individuals are almost entirely absent from the legislative framework.
A reformed definition of rape must be truly universal, anchored not in the gender or marital status of the parties, but in the absence of consent. Consent must be clearly defined in statute as affirmative, informed, and freely given. The law must recognise that coercion takes many forms, including physical force, economic dependence, age differentials, and relational power, and that the absence of physical resistance does not constitute consent.
Child Protection: Closing Gaps
Child sexual abuse in Bangladesh is catastrophically underaddressed. Despite the existence of children’s courts under the Children’s Act of 2013, only sixteen such courts had been established across the country’s sixty-four districts as of 2020. This means that child victims of sexual abuse in most parts of the country must navigate an adult criminal justice system wholly unsuited to their vulnerability. Every district must have a functioning, properly staffed, child-friendly court as a matter of legal obligation, not administrative aspiration.
The digital frontier presents a rapidly escalating threat that the law has barely acknowledged. Bangladesh has no comprehensive legislation criminalising online grooming of children, live streaming of child sexual abuse, or the production and distribution of child sexual abuse material. As internet access expands rapidly across the country, and as predators exploit digital anonymity with growing sophistication, this legislative vacuum is actively dangerous. Dedicated cybercrime units with specialist training in child exploitation offences are no longer a luxury; they are a necessity.
Child marriage remains one of the most direct enablers of child sexual abuse. The Child Marriage Restraint Act continues to permit child marriages under so-called special circumstances, a provision that functions in practice as an open door for the legalisation of the rape of minors. This exemption must be removed without qualification.
The Social Architecture of Silence
Legal reform alone cannot dismantle a culture in which survivors are blamed, shamed into silence, and effectively punished for coming forward. In Bangladesh, a survivor of rape who approaches police frequently encounters victim-blaming, demands for proof of resistance, and in some cases, further harassment and assault. Many women and girls are pressured by families and community leaders into withdrawing cases in favour of extrajudicial settlements, particularly where the perpetrator is known to the victim, which is the case in most child abuse situations.
Police must receive mandatory, continuous training in survivor-centred investigation. One-stop crisis centres, where a survivor can access medical care, legal aid, psychological counselling, and safe shelter in a single location without being passed from institution to institution, must be expanded beyond urban centres into every district and subdistrict of the country. Currently, the gap between those who contact national helplines and those who receive actual services is stark and unacceptable.
Education, Community, and Changing Norms
Ultimately, rape and child abuse are sustained by social norms that normalise male entitlement, suppress female agency, enforce silence around sexuality, and treat the family as a space exempt from scrutiny. Addressing these norms requires structural change at the community level. Age-appropriate, evidence-based sexuality and consent education must be integrated into school curricula at every level, not as an imported concept, but as a framework rooted in children’s right to safety and dignity.
Religious leaders, community elders, and local government representatives carry enormous authority in Bangladeshi society, and their voices in condemning sexual violence (not as dishonour to families, but as crimes against persons) carry weight that legislation alone cannot replicate. Sustained, government-funded public awareness campaigns, developed in partnership with civil society and survivors’ groups, must challenge victim-blaming narratives and reframe sexual violence as a matter of perpetrator accountability.
Witness and victim protection legislation must be passed and implemented. Survivors who report crimes must not live in fear of retribution. Without protection, silence will remain the rational choice for the most vulnerable.
Bangladesh is a nation that has proven, repeatedly, its capacity for transformative social change. The eradication of rape and child abuse requires that same collective resolve, not in the form of capital punishment that satisfies outrage while delivering impunity, but in the form of a justice system rebuilt to serve survivors, a law reformed to protect everyone, and a society determined, at last, to stop looking away.
