While the entire nation was too busy obsessing over the outcome of Lovello Miss World Bangladesh 2017, not many had the time or chance to notice that a seven-year-old girl was found raped and killed in Dhaka’s Jatrabari.
The nature of the crime is made even more horrific by the state in which the child’s body was found. Both of her hands and legs were firmly tied up with ropes while a large cloth was forcibly stuffed inside her small mouth.
Postmortem pictures and videos taken by locals who found her body showed that her face had become devoid of all colour. Her mouth was cast wide open, with a look of sheer terror and trauma forever etched on her beautiful face.
There were scars and signs of struggle all over her body. Can we even begin to imagine the insurmountable pain she must have felt?
The little girl was later identified as Jariya Akhter, who had gone in the early hours of Sunday morning, October 1, to use the communal bathroom.
On her way back, she was intercepted by her neighbour, Rafiqul Islam, who took her to his room and raped her.
It is when little Jariya screamed during the rape that he stuffed the large cloth up to her windpipe, causing death by asphyxiation. Thereafter he wrapped the child’s body in a thick blanket, placed it over the wardrobe, locked the room, and fled.
The gruesome details of the incident and the footage of the crime scene are bound to make anyone’s stomach churn. Yet child rape is hardly uncommon in Bangladesh.
According to data from Bangladesh Shishu Adhikar Forum (BSAF), 399 children have already fallen victim to rape from the period between January and August this year.
Don’t trust thy neighbour
Earlier this year in July, a four-year-old child was similarly raped and killed by her 35 year old neighbour in the capital’s Badda slum.
Little Tanha had gone out of her quarters to play with other slum children when the man lured the child into his adjacent room with the promise of food and then raped her. As the girl screamed out, Shipon responded by strangling her to death. Then he dumped her body in a commode and fled. It is important to highlight the prevalence of child rape in Bangladesh, not only for the purposes of distributing news and raising awareness, but also because it debunks some of the dominant rape myths a sizable portion of our population believes to be true, ie that rape is primarily a result of a sexual provocation or arousal which may therefore be attributed to the victim.
What did little Jariya and Tanha do to deserve those traumatic ordeals? Did they show too much skin? Were they out too late? Did they mix with the wrong people? Should they have just “remained at home” as “good girls” do? In other words, did they do all they could do to “avoid getting raped” or did they invite the rape on themselves?
These victim-blaming questions are frequently and shamelessly thrown in the aftermath of rape incidents (such as the infamous Banani rape) which only work to normalise something as abhorrent as rape which in turn paves the way for such heinous incidents to occur.
When rape is seen as normal
We consider rape as an inescapable natural calamity which must be avoided by women by being more careful instead of a learned social behaviour that men must unlearn.
We believe that a rapist’s inclination to rape is inherently biological because once a man is sexually aroused he cannot help himself; he has to have sexual intercourse, even if it means by way of rape.
We believe that because rape is the manifestation of an uncontrollable biological urge it must have been the result of the woman flaunting her beauty or sexuality in some way or another.
But what sexuality was a seven-year-old child flaunting when she got raped?
Child rape like those of Jariya’s also shows that rape is not, as we often tend to think, exclusively about sexual gratification.
Every time we stigmatise a rape victim, we are effectively advancing rape as an instrument of revenge
Rape can be and frequently has been an act through which men seek to assert control or take revenge.
Rafiqul has already confessed to the crime under section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure before a judicial magistrate, where he brazenly declared that the motive was to take revenge on Jariya’s father, who he recently had a squabble with.
Jariya’s father told Channel i News that this altercation was over the unpaid dues Jahirul had in the small corner shop he owns. Jariya’s case is indicative of a wider and alarming increase in child rape over the past five years which experts believe are usually an act of retaliation.
Sheepa Hafiza, Executive Director of Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK), remarked that rape of children aged between seven to 12 years has greatly increased in the last five years, adding: “Most of these cases are an act of retaliation over some fights, land disputes, or money.”
Rape as a weapon
It is imperative that we question and understand what precisely makes rape an attractive tool for retaliation or revenge in our country.
It is our collective, social stigmatisation of rape victims that makes rape a powerful weapon of revenge and retaliation.
Rapists who want to cause harm to their enemies know that, by raping one of their female relatives, they would be causing irreparable harm to the girl’s “reputation” and future prospects (such as the likelihood of marriage).
For who would want their saintly son to marry an “impure” or “damaged” girl? We live in a society where rape victims themselves are made to feel ashamed for being raped.
Thus, it is crucial that we realise that every time we stigmatise and ostracise a rape victim for the sole reason that she was raped, we are effectively empowering and advancing rape as an instrument of revenge for actual and potential rapists.
So let’s ask ourselves: Is that really something we want to be complicit in doing?
Taqbir Huda is currently working as a research officer at Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs and volunteers at Bangladesh Society for the Enforcement of Human Rights.
