Her ruin, her rebellion

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They will tell you a woman breaks loudly. She doesn't.
She breaks the way a glass breaks underwater — silently, slowly, in pieces no one bothers to count. In Bangladesh, there are tens of millions of us learning to break this way.

She was twenty-two when she learned that some marriages are not homes. They are weather. You wake up and check the sky of his face before you check the sky outside. You learn which silence means rain. Which silence means storm. Which silence means go to the kitchen, lower your eyes, breathe softer, exist smaller.

In this country, they teach girls many things. They teach us to fold our laughter like saris — neatly, modestly, out of sight. They teach us that a good wife swallows. Swallows her voice. Swallows her hunger. Swallows the sentence forming on her tongue when his mother says, meye manush er eto kotha kiser?

She swallowed for ten years. She swallowed until her throat became a graveyard of unsaid things. And she is not rare.

The 2024 Violence Against Women Survey — conducted by Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics across 27,476 women, in partnership with the UN — found that three out of four women in Bangladesh, 76%, have experienced at least one form of intimate partner violence in their lifetime. Forty-nine percent of us were hurt by our husbands in the last twelve months alone.

People ask what domestic violence looks like, and they imagine bruises. Cinema bruises. Loud, purple, visible — the kind a neighbour might whisper about over morning tea. But the violence that ate her had no colour.

It lived in the way he stopped seeing her. The way he walked past her in their own bedroom as if she were furniture he had grown tired of. The way her name left his mouth like an inconvenience. The way she asked for nothing — not love, not tenderness, not even a kind word — and was still told she asked for too much.

The same survey by our own government counted it, in cold percentages, exactly as The Daily Star has been printing on its front pages this week:

Half of every wedding photograph in this country. Half of every smiling bride your mother showed you on a phone screen, saying dekho, koto sundor lagche. One in two of those brides is being controlled in her own home — what she wears, where she goes, who she calls, what she earns, what she allows herself to want.

And we are not even the worst in the region. We are second. According to the World Health Organisation, Bangladesh ranks 11th in the world for intimate partner violence — the second-worst country in South Asia, behind only Afghanistan. Afghanistan and us. Sit with that comparison the next time someone tells you Bangladesh has come a long way.

There is a particular cruelty in being erased by the person who once promised to know you. You begin to wonder if you are still there. You touch your own face in the mirror to make sure.

But here is what the statistics will not tell you about a Bangladeshi marriage: You do not marry a man in this country. You marry a household. He was the fist. But his mother was the architect. She was the one who told her that her cooking was not enough, her saree was too bright, her laughter was too loud, her education was too proud. She was the one who counted the gold she came with and decided it was insufficient.

She was the one who watched her son raise his voice across the dinner table and said nothing — and then later, in the kitchen, told her she must have provoked him. Meye manush ke shojhya korte hoy. Tumi ki jano na?

His sisters whispered. His father pretended not to hear. His aunts asked her, every Eid, when the next baby was coming, as if her body were a calendar they had subscribed to. And when the violence came — first in words, then in silences, then in the cruelties that have no English translation — the family did not stop it. They managed it. They told her to be patient. They told her a good wife endures. They told her the neighbours would talk. They told her her own mother would be ashamed.

The 2024 BBS survey can measure how many of us were hit. It cannot measure how many of us were held down — not by one man's hands, but by the entire architecture of a Bangladeshi household built specifically to ensure we stayed. The mother-in-law who became a second jailer. The father-in-law who agreed to look away. The sisters-in-law who chose family honour over a woman's bones. The cousins who saw and said nothing.

This is the violence the survey has no column for. This is the violence every Bangladeshi woman recognises before she finishes reading this sentence. We are not abused by men alone in this country. We are abused by systems wearing the faces of relatives.

Then the babies came. And oh Allah — the babies. Her daughters arrived like two small suns into a house that had forgotten light. She held them and understood, for the first time, that love could be a weight you carry willingly. That a mother's arms are the first country a child ever knows.

She wanted to give them a beautiful country. Instead she gave them a mother who smiled with broken teeth behind closed lips. A mother who hid in bathrooms to cry quietly so the sound would not climb the walls. A mother who learned to laugh at the right moments at family gatherings while something inside her was quietly bleeding out onto the marble floor.

Her eldest once asked her, Ma, tumi eto chup keno? Ma, why are you so quiet? She had no answer a four-year-old could carry.

But our researchers do. A professor of anthropology at Dhaka University has been saying it for years: children from homes where partner violence is common grow up more susceptible to trauma, fear of intimacy, avoidant behaviour, and tendencies towards revenge. Which means the violence does not stop with us. It travels. It boards the school bus with our sons. It sits beside our daughters at their own weddings. It is the inheritance no mother in this country wants to leave, and yet — generation after generation — we leave it anyway, because no one ever taught us how to break the chain without breaking ourselves.

In Bangladesh, when a woman suffers, the village becomes a courtroom and she is always the defendant. She must have done something. She doesn't know how to keep a husband. Her tongue is too sharp. Her temper is too hot. Her job is too much. Her silence is too proud.

According to the OECD's Social Institutions and Gender Index, Bangladesh scores 81.9 on discriminatory family structures — placing us at number 22 out of 188 countries in the world for the most discriminatory family system on earth. Twenty-two out of one hundred and eighty-eight. There are 166 countries where it is easier to be a woman inside a family than it is here.

The numbers prove our silence is not a choice. It is a verdict already passed. Of the women in Bangladesh who experienced intimate partner violence, 64% never told a single soul. Only 7.4% — seven out of every hundred — ever took legal action. Thirty-seven percent said they considered it unnecessary even to mention what was done to them.

A woman in Bangladesh has been taught so completely that her suffering does not matter that she will look at her own broken ribs, her own swallowed years, her own disappearing soul, and call it unnecessary. We are taught that endurance is holy. Nobody tells us endurance can also be the slow shape of a funeral.

The day she decided to leave, she did not cry. She had used up all her crying years ago, in a bathroom at 2 a.m., with the tap running so her children would not hear. She packed two small bags. She looked at her daughters sleeping — their small chests rising and falling, their eyelashes wet with the dreams of children who still believe the world is gentle — and she made the most violent decision a Bangladeshi mother can make. She chose herself.

Do you understand what that sentence costs in this country? A woman is allowed to be many things here. A daughter. A wife. A mother. A sacrifice. A silence. But the moment she chooses herself — the moment she dares to say I matter too — she becomes a scandal. A cautionary tale. A name whispered at weddings as a warning to other girls. Dekho, oi je. She left her husband. She left her children.

They never say what she left behind — the part of her that was disappearing one swallowed sentence at a time. The woman who was becoming a ghost in her own house. The mother who was learning to love her daughters from beneath a sheet of glass. They don't say that either. They never do.

She is thirty-three now. She lives in a different city, in a small flat where the walls are still learning her name. She works. She wakes up before the sun and she works, because survival in this country, for a woman alone, is not a feeling — it is a full-time occupation.

Some nights she sits on the floor with her back against the door and she lets herself miss them. Her girls. The smell of their hair after a bath. The weight of the smaller one falling asleep on her chest. The way the older one used to mispronounce bhalobashi and it sounded like a song only she knew the words to. She misses them in a way that has no bottom. But she does not regret. Regret is a luxury for women who had other choices. She had only two: disappear, or leave. And she chose the one where she might still exist by the time her daughters are old enough to ask her, Ma, what happened? She wants to be there to answer. She wants to be alive enough to answer.

In the first six months of 2025 alone, police in Bangladesh recorded over 11,000 cases of violence against women and children — an average of around 2,000 a month in recent months, up from 1,500. By one count from the same data, a woman is raped in this country every nine hours.

While you read this, while you scroll past it, while you tell yourself it is too heavy for a weekday afternoon — somewhere in Bangladesh, the clock is moving toward another nine. And those are only the ones counted. The brave 7.4% who walked into a police station. The ones whose bodies bled in ways that could not be hidden.

The rest of us — the silent millions — are not in any file. We are in our kitchens. We are in our living rooms. We are in school WhatsApp groups and Eid family photos and the back rows of weddings. We are the country's most carefully kept secret.

To the women reading this in Dhaka, in Sylhet, in Khulna, in Rangpur, in Cox's Bazar, in villages whose names the city has forgotten — to the women sitting on the edge of a bed right now, calculating whether tonight will be a quiet night or a loud one — she is not here to give you advice. She is not foolish enough to think advice can lift the weight you are carrying. She is only here to say: I saw you. I see you. I was you. And the country that taught us to be silent does not own the ending of our stories.

An open letter to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh

You took the oath of office on the seventeenth of February, before a country that bled for the right to choose again. You inherited a nation rebuilding itself — its laws, its conscience, its courage. You inherited, too, the 76% of us. We are not a constituency. We are a wound the size of half your population.

We have laws. We have the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act of 2010. We have the Prevention of Oppression against Women and Children Act of 2000. We have the Dowry Prohibition Act. We have words on paper. What we do not have is a country where those words protect us before we have to bury someone we love.

Only 7.4% of survivors ever take legal action. The other 92.6% of us are still bleeding in our homes while the law sleeps somewhere we cannot reach it. Build the Bangladesh where she can reach it.

Build the helpline that picks up at 3 a.m. Build the shelter that does not turn her away because her father refuses to take her back. Build the police station where she is not asked what she was wearing. Build the courtroom that moves faster than the bruises can heal into something deniable.

And build the law that recognises the truth every Bangladeshi woman knows in her bones — that the violence in her home is not always one man’s fist. It is sometimes an entire household. It is the mother-in-law who locks the door. The father-in-law who looks away. The family that manages the abuse instead of stopping it. Until our laws name that, we are only treating the symptom.

To Barrister Zaima Rahman

You studied the law at Lincoln’s Inn. You crossed an ocean to learn the language of justice in rooms most Bangladeshi women will never enter. You came back. You stood on the same soil where your grandmother walked in 2001 to cast a vote, holding your six-year old hand.

The girls you waved to from a campaign car in Dhaka-17 — many of them will be married before they are 20. Many of them will be the 76%. Many of them will swallow what we swallowed, because no one in power ever bent down close enough to hear them. Bend down close.

You have the law. You have the name. You have the platform that 10,000 women’s organizations have begged for, for 55 years. Use it for the woman who will never have a name the way you have one. Be the barrister who made a country safer for its daughters. That is a legacy that outlives any government.

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We have built bridges that span our rivers. We have built garment factories that clothe half the world. We have built a cricket team that makes grandfathers weep. We have built revolutions — three in one lifetime — and our young people died in the streets for the right to be heard. But we have not yet built a country where a woman can say I am hurting without becoming the story instead of the survivor.

Build that, too. Build it before another mother teaches her daughter to smile through a closing fist. Build it before another girl learns that her silence is the price of admission to being loved. Build it before another mother-in-law inherits a daughter-in-law and mistakes her for property. Build it before another woman becomes a name whispered at a wedding as a warning. Build the Bangladesh where our daughters do not have to choose between disappearing and being called scandalous. That is the Bangladesh worth being proud of. That is the Bangladesh worth bleeding for. That is the Bangladesh 70 million of us are already waiting for — in the dark, with the volume turned low so he doesn’t hear.

They called it her ruin — the day she walked away with two bags and a heartbeat that no longer asked permission to exist. They called it ruin. She called it the first day she finally survived.

For every woman in this country who is reading this with her back against a locked door — you are not alone. You were never alone. We have been here, in the silence with you, all along. And we are not silent anymore.