Every day, women in Bangladesh are forging new paths and crossing new frontiers despite enormous barriers to their success. Sadaf Saaz explores the causes of and solutions to one of the most entrenched and damaging of these barriers, the prevalence of violence against women.
Barriers are a fact of life for working women in Bangladesh, whatever their class or occupation. They still face outright legal barriers just because they are women. . There are also tremendous social pressures against the very fact of a woman making her primary occupation outside the home. Another barrier working women regularly face is a sort of ‘moral policing’ that judges women by a harsh and narrow standard of gender-appropriate behaviour that can stunt a woman’s achievements, her income, the reaching of her potential, and can have a detrimental impact on her own sense of her self-worth. But, perhaps the worst barrier against women’s success is the prevalence of violence against them.
In a conference of women’s organisations in 1995 in Savar, attended by women from all over Bangladesh, there was a consensus among the participants that violence and the fear of violence was the biggest single impediment to women achieving their potential. Violence against women is seen as a world-wide phenomenon which cuts across education and income levels. However, although violence has a crushing impact on a women work life, the source of that violence is often found in her home and/or private life. Prevalence studies across many countries indicate a 30 to 60% prevalence, among women, of physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner. .
In a study conducted by Naripokkho, a women’s activist organisation, in 1996 there was a 60% prevalence rate of violence among adult married women in Bangladesh and girls in the 11to 15 years age group were most at risk of abduction, rape, trafficking and acid attack (the act of deliberately throwing acid or other corrosive substance on a person’s body or face). In 2005, the first multi-country study of domestic violence conducted by WHO revealed that 40 to60% of married women in Bangladesh experience physical, verbal or sexual abuse by their husbands.
The near-constant presence of violence or the fear of violence – which can be based on actual threats or reasonably presumed threats – results in severe physical constraints on women. This fact is, in turn, used to justify unequal treatment of women, and to further restrict their movement, so much that women are often not allowed to continue their education or pursue other opportunities.
This is where the ‘moral policing’ comes in. The ‘fear’ that society uses to justify circumscribing a woman’s activities is different from the fears she feels for herself (although the two things often get conflated when people debate about policies affecting women). The former is not limited to a fear of violence or rape; it is also the fear of consensual sexual relations outside marriage. There are actually restraints on women’s sexual behaviour written into the law – including the Penal Code, and Special Legislation enacted to ‘protect women’. Moral constraints can be a result of the arbitrary use and misuse of religion by so-called religious ‘authorities’, and by ordinary men (and sometimes women), which make pronouncements that acquire the status of edicts, depending on the context and the status of the person making the pronouncement vis a vis the woman who is subjected to it. All of this takes place against the backdrop of predominant beliefs; prejudices about what constitutes ‘appropriate behaviour’, defining the boundaries of women’s lives.
In the women’s movement in Bangladesh, women’s activist organisations like Naripokkho have tried to tackle violence based on women’s own experiences. Naripokkho has outlined some important aspects of the broader fight against violence, such as the need to see women as survivors rather than victims; to give voice and visibility to survivors; to reflect pro-women and anti-violence views in the programmes and policies that affect women; and in prevailing social attitudes, behaviours, and even language.
The movement also highlighted the need for communities to internalise the fact that violence against women is not, in fact, a loss of honour for the woman, her family or her country, but rather a crime against her. The movement did not lose sight of the need to hold the state accountable for the specific obligations it has to respect, protect and fulfil the right of women and girls to live a life free from violence. A two-pronged =attack was proposed, which would build a constituency or base for the movement and also engage with the state to effect positive change.
The former consisted of mobilising support and liaising with other women, Human rights organisations and other NGOs and clarifying and articulating the movement’s vision, goals and demands. From this process came the ‘Building a voice’ initiatives, such as Naripokkho’s convening of a network of women-led organisations (535 groups representing all 64 districts) called Doorbar, as well as taking part in other movements, like Shonghoti, which is an organisation dedicated to standing up for sex-workers rights.
The second prong of the movement’s plan of attack, engagement with the state, entailed lobbying at various levels from the local to the national, participation in government committees and monitoring state machinery dealing with the different aspects of violence against women – like monitoring cases at the police stations, hospitals and judiciary – and giving technical inputs on the Government of Bangladesh’s Multi-sectoral programme to combat Violence against Women.
Doorbar came together to work against violence against women as well as to encourage and support women’s participation in the public sphere, including their participation in local Union Parishad elections. The movement was successful in ensuring women’s solidarity in certain key issues. They were able to clearly articulate the issues they wanted to address. This was an important part of the process, to identify, with reasonable precision, what the root causes of the problems were and what solutions would be acceptable, before one could stand up and fight for them.
Doorbar has had a direct impact on the lives of women through collective action in individual cases. For example, they were able to reduce spousal abuse by rallying together in groups to prevent a husband from beating his wife. This act worked as a powerful, concrete protest against domestic violence in the community. Doorbar has also taken part in government committees at different levels such the Nari Nirjaton Protirodh Committee (i.e., the committee to stop violence against women) and, on numerous occasions, successfully mobilised support and lobbied local officials – District Commissioner, Officer in Charge of Police, for example – and stood by women in the community who were subjected to violence. These activities gave the women public visibility of women in various ways.
The strategies used by Doorbar to combat violence against women included making and maintaining contact with survivors and their families (and with perpetrators and their families when required), fact finding with regard to specific incidents, assisting survivors in filing and pursing cases, keeping up contact with the local administration and law enforcement agencies, organising protests– like human chains – mobilising media to build pressure, lobbying members of parliament, assisting with arbitration and arranging for medical support. Many of the Doorbar leaders became ‘go to’ persons in the community for a range of problems facing women, and are often consulted by community leaders.
The late Nasreen Huq, the dedicated women’s rights activist, had worked with acid attack survivors, contacting them through newspaper reports, visiting them in the burns wards of hospitals, raising money and arranging for their treatment. She and others also facilitated the formation of an acid survivors’ network, which enabled them to gain crucial support from each other and other organisations and individuals as well as to highlight their problems. These efforts finally led to the formation of the now established Acid Survivors Foundation. Their cases were meticulously followed up, with the media playing a positive role. There was a process of supporting the transformation of crime victims into crime survivors; some of whom evolved into activists for the cause of supporting other survivors and preventing such crimes in the future. This process gave survivors the ability to tackle the challenges they faced and to gain confidence and strength from the support of others and have a space to make their voices heard publicly. This process resulted in increased attention from law enforcement agencies and society in general. Since this movement took hold, acid attacks against women have declined.
The readymade garments (RMG) industry employs 4.4 million people, over 80% of whom are women in Bangladesh. Their public presence (at their workplaces as well as en route to and from work) has led to a much increased public visibility and movement for women , during the day and night and this has had a positive effect on the mobility of all women in urban spaces. The streets of Dhaka are certainly safer, where women from all backgrounds and professions have benefited and are visibly more mobile than two decades ago.
One seriously underexplored strategy for tackling the issue of violence against is that of actually engaging with men. Women’s groups are often wary or critical of this option, in part out of a fear that scarce and much needed funds will be diverted from women’s programmes into those that focus on men. However, as long as those causing the problem are not made to be part of the solution, only the symptom rather than the root cause will have any real chance of being addressed. In a 2010 research conducted by Naripokkho to explore the experiences of male perpetrators of violence against women, interesting issues were highlighted. Sometimes the expressions of violence were revealed to be a defence against disturbing or uncomfortable emotions, the management of which was a serious struggle for these men. They had never been taught to make sense of difficult and uncomfortable feelings. Violent behaviour seemed to them an effective and acceptable method of getting rid of bad feelings. For example, many of the men struggled with feelings of rejection and therefore justified the use of violence as revenge, always locating the responsibility for the violent acts in the ‘other’. When these men had feelings of helplessness, they say it as normal to use violence to cope.
Hence, when designing preventive or rehabilitative programmes to tackle violence against women, certain key things should be considered: that violence against women is not inevitable or acceptable; that there is a need to learn to take responsibility for one’s actions; and that there is also a need to help people to understand and manage difficult emotions (like anger, frustration, rejection, and sexual impulses) by communicating with them about these issues in helpful and appropriate ways. When talking to perpetrators of violence, activists and researchers have found that some of the perpetrators actually reflected on what they had done and this reduced the violence.
In Bangladesh, as in many societies, rape is still often seen as a woman’s fault and domestic violence is still not recognised as a problem of criminal law or even as morally wrong. One of the best ways to address this is for women to gain greater public visibility so that their problems and struggles are no longer perceived by individual women as simply individual misfortunes but are recognised as larger societal problems. It is also crucial to build support networks that enable women to gain strength and confidence and clarity of purpose. Equally important is the need to engage men in the process of prevention: encouraging and enabling them to change their behaviour and holding them accountable for their actions. These are some important steps to tackling this issue of widespread violence against women which seems to continue to be a major impediment to the progress of women, despite our many achievements.
