The people of Bangladesh are now searching for Hercules. I cannot quite tell whether the entire country has turned into another Troy. People believe that only Hercules can rescue them from the monstrous acts being inflicted upon women -- just as he was glorified in the Trojan War for rescuing a maiden.
As children, we used to see heroes like Hercules in Bengali cinema -- those who would arrive at the scene just in time to save a woman from harassment or take revenge by killing the perpetrators.
But can anyone like Hercules truly bring a complete transformation in the country's overall situation?
On August 7, 2024, my better half and I were returning to Dhaka from Khagrachari. Due to the ongoing circumstances, there were fewer vehicles on the road. There was no direct bus available, so we decided to travel in segments. We reached Mohipal in Feni from Khagrachari and planned to take another bus from there.
After waiting for a while, a bus arrived. Just as we were about to board, the bus conductor noticed the bangles on my wife’s hands and the sindoor on her forehead and declared, "I will not let any Awami League supporters board this bus today."
My wife and I stood frozen at Mohipal for a long time. Tears rolled down her eyes. The eyes of every passerby and protester were fixed on us -- with a look of vengeance that seemed ready to crush us. For the first time since birth, I felt unsafe in my own country. And yet, neither of us had ever supported either the Awami League or BNP.
At that moment, I wished for someone like Hercules -- a revolutionary or even a law enforcement officer -- to intervene, punish the bus conductor, or protect us from the hateful gazes of the crowd.
But then I wondered, even if Hercules did come, what about the next bus stop? What if another conductor behaved the same way, or another mob looked at us with the same vicious intent in another place? Could Hercules possibly reach every place in time?
In the past few days, multiple incidents of rape have occurred across the country. From a four-year-old girl who had gone to collect flowers for floral tribute on February 21 to elderly women -- no one has been spared. Even a moving bus was stopped, and gang rape was carried out.
The real problem lies in the environment that continuously produces rapists
A man, in a Hercules-like act, killed the person who had raped his wife. People are applauding! Many believe that taking justice into one's own hands is the right thing to do, or that the criminal justice system should swiftly ensure the death penalty for rapists.
Strict state laws, active law enforcement, or even the rise of a Hercules-like vigilante can create a kind of vertical surveillance, which might temporarily deter individual rapists.
Classical criminology states that humans are rational beings who act based on the pleasure-pain principle -- if committing a crime brings more pain than pleasure, they will refrain from doing it.
But the real problem lies in the environment that continuously produces rapists. A child grows up in a household where women are treated as commodities, watches movies and advertisements that objectify women, listens to religious teachings that suggest a woman's role is to entertain men, learns from friends, and witnesses teachers in schools engaging in inappropriate behavior with female students. This environment gradually shapes the belief that women are objects of consumption.
The issue is not just the emergence of individual rapists -- it is the creation of a rape culture and the normalization of rape-supporting ideologies.
This means that while strict laws, active law enforcement, and capital punishment for perpetrators might create temporary vertical surveillance to control rape, they cannot eliminate the environment that breeds such thoughts.
This is why later criminal justice systems advocate for horizontal change. While vertical surveillance may be necessary in some cases, the real transformation must come through education system reforms, changes in religious institutional teachings, shifts in drama, cinema, and advertisements where women will not be presented as products, and a societal transformation in attitudes toward women -- at the levels of state, community, and family.
Great thinkers have said that if one wants to cultivate crops on barren land again, they must remove seven layers of soil -- a fundamental transformation.
Likewise, to change a nation, all its stakeholders and institutions require a radical transformation -- one that is as deep as removing seven layers of soil.
Nikhil Chandra Nath is a PhD Student in Criminal Justice at the University of New Haven.
