Amidst the ongoing brouhaha over what appears to be a random collection of misfits from various universities protesting what amounts to societal progress, and the High Court’s tacit approval of their incoherent cause, one key piece of information seems to have slipped through the cracks of public discourse surrounding this entire issue.
The High Court’s justification behind granting bail to Shila -- one of the accused at the centre of the Narsingdi case where a 22-year-old woman was sexually harassed and humiliated over her allegedly indecent attire -- was that a woman cannot sexually abuse another woman.
At the risk of regurgitating my own headline: What?
The fact that one of the two direct divisions of our Supreme Court collectively believes that a woman cannot sexually abuse another woman is, to put it mildly, alarming -- these are men and women, greying as they are, who are in charge of not only doling out justice but defining exactly what “justice” means, after all.
However, one cursory glance at laws relating to rape and sexual violence in Bangladesh is all it takes to realize that there is ample precedence for such attitudes within our judiciary. To cite Equality Now, sexual violence according to Bangladeshi law essentially looks like this:
- The rape offense is narrowly applied to include peno-vaginal penetration only. Other forms of sexual penetration are covered under “unnatural offenses” or sexual oppression/assault, which carry significantly lower penalties
- Bangladeshi law does not provide for any circumstances involving persons in positions of authority wherein consent is immaterial
- Bangladeshi law does not deal with the issue of incapacity to provide consent at all, in the case of adult victims
- Bangladeshi law explicitly permits marital rape of adult women in all circumstances, with no exception even for when the parties are separated
- The law explicitly permits marital rape of children over the age of 13. There is a mismatched punishment clause which provides punishment of two years’ imprisonment in cases of marital rape of a child under 12 years of age, with no punishment designated for marital rape of children between the ages of 12 and 13
A lot of depressing stuff to unpack here (we’re still using that phrase, right?).
A direct result of our country’s colonial hangover, the “unnatural offenses” provision (under the infamous Section 377) shows how damaging the impact of dismissing the rights of sexual minorities can be on us heteros. But given that Bangladesh officially recognizes hijras as being “the third gender,” exactly what kind of sex do our law-makers think they’re having?
Getting back to the protests, debates over what clothing is and isn’t “proper as per the country’s culture” will never bear fruit as cultures invariably begin at home: For every 50 slack-jawed fundamentalists taught that a woman should never bare her knees, there will be at least one city girl who gets to pick what to wear when venturing outside her home.
What clearly needs to be fixed are the numerous holes in our laws that facilitate retrograde attitudes towards women. I realize that Bangladesh isn’t exactly a beacon of gender equality (the kind that can’t be used as marketing fodder for our ever-rising GDP) but for sexism and misogyny to malignantly spread throughout our judiciary is not a prospect we should be comfortable with.
But when even children aren’t free from the clutches of our shoddy law-making, what hope does a grown woman have?
Rubaiyat Kabir is Joint Editor, Editorial and Op-Ed, Dhaka Tribune.
