Overall, with the revolutions that have taken place and the movements and policies that have been implemented, some things never seem to fully change.
The safety of a woman in Bangladesh has come down to such narrow standards that a woman would rather choose to walk alone in the pitch darkness of night on a road free of men (which is quite utopian) than walk down a street full of them in broad daylight.
Most girls are told to be home before sunset, or before it gets “too late.” The rule is ridiculous, because the risk barely changes through the day. So we are left to calculate possibilities and mentally prepare to fight off an incident, especially when commuting alone.
One question still keeps me up at night: if women are kept indoors for fear of being raped at night, why not put a curfew on men?
It is like caging the visitors at a zoo while the tiger roams free. Perhaps the guards have failed to keep the tiger caged yet have succeeded in caging the visitors.
After all, the tiger has nothing to fear. We, the humans, do.
Statistically, Bangladesh ranks very low on women’s safety, and that does not even count the thousands of incidents that go unreported.
What about the cases that never make it to the TV news?
A woman may feel unsafe in her own household at the hands of family members or relatives and still be ashamed of speaking up, because society will somehow turn the sword on her.
This is hardly rare. It is a curse to be born a woman in a society like this, in a world like this. Conditions may be improving in developed countries (though this cannot really be verified), but they represent only a small fraction of the four billion women in the world.
Even so, it is nothing to be proud of, because under regimes like the Taliban, conditions keep worsening. Women’s safety has fallen so deep it feels buried in the grave of every violated victim.
Globally, the net progress feels like zero, if not negative.
To be born a woman in a developing or underdeveloped country is to fight for rights: the right to vote and the right to education. But the intangible ones (freedom, safety, peace of mind, protection) remain neglected.
The saddest part is that the most vulnerable are often the most silenced: their hands tied in invisible chains, their mouths sealed with red tape.
These victims suffer for years, made to stay obedient in abusive households, pressured by society to preserve “dignity” and “social status” rather than speak out.
It is ultimately the fault of society and the system that continues to keep men as the dominant force.
In most households in Bangladesh, under patriarchy, the man earns money, goes outside, and makes the major financial decisions. Meanwhile, the woman is burdened with household labour, child-rearing, and unpaid labour.
It is not a choice for many women, but rather a submission to tradition.
When this continues, women-- especially those in poor and vulnerable households-- do not have the financial independence to live on their own. To them, staying in an abusive home often seems like a better option than homelessness.
In this country, marrying off a girl means her family is tension-free; it means the girl is finally handed over to someone. But why does it need to be that a woman needs someone to take care of her, such that the absence of a guard turns into a flaw?
The question still remains whether the families are actually “tension-free,” given how many marital physical abuses happen, not to mention the mental abuses as well.
It is not quite rare to see on Facebook people taking lives just because the social stigma gave no other way out of that psychological manipulation. But still, it gets normalized; be careful, though: any abuse by a man is normalized, whereas any fight/protest against that abuse is not normalized.
It is these women who have to learn it as if it is a process of natural selection, to learn to live with that misery of always being in an invisible cage, the keys to the doors never belonging to them, of course. Well, after all, in a society where teen marriages, child marriages, and polygamy are all justified, who dares to change the mindset of people?
It has been tried, but failed every time because the source cannot be uprooted; some thinking is deeply planted in patriarchy to the point that it is essential for these flaws to exist for patriarchy to continue. And for a country who has not quite seen anything else broadly other than misogyny and patriarchy, nobody is to blame.
For centuries, the vulture of victim-blaming has persisted, because it is women who have been forced to sacrifice everything just to remain accepted by society. This has conditioned many women, especially those without access to education, to believe that they are responsible for the violence done to them. That they must adjust. That they must compromise.
Life was meant to be lived by all beings. But for women, it often feels like a fragile struggle for survival, where existence itself feels like a crime.
In a country where girls are not safe at home, on the streets, in transport, or even on deathbeds, I wonder where women finally get to rest in peace --if they ever do.
Henceforth, the question always remains, “When does a woman finally feel safe?” Or perhaps safety was never meant for us--only endurance was.
Labiba Tasnim is a student in 12th grade at S.F.X. Greenherald International School in Bangladesh.