Laws not enough without effective application to end sexual harassment

BANGLADESH has become a country in which it is dangerous to be a female. Just a day ago, newspapers all over the country reported on how five unknown criminals forcefully took a 21-year-old Garo girl inside a grey-coloured microbus from the Biswa Road busstand and then violated her on the running vehicle and threw her on road-side in Uttara.
For too long, this epidemic of violence against women and adult girls has been ignored or treated as an insignificant issue. Unfortunately, we have come to a point where mere development and education alone will not resolve the issue of sex crimes. Not long ago Bangladesh Chhatra League cadres were boasting about raping over 100 women in Jahangirnagar University as well as being thought to be behind the sexual assaults on women during the Pohela Boishakh celebrations by some quarters.
In the cases mentioned above, the government is culpable, either out of negligence or direct involvement, in the grotesque treatment of women. Sex crime and assaults on women and children all over the nation is growing fast and that has to be addressed from the state level, from the top to down. It makes us wonder — how many women need to be violated and scarred for life before our government wakes up to the reality and takes action? How many women and children need to be dishonoured to make the government remember its duty to protect female citizens by enforcing law and order? A large part of the solution lies in the government’s way of preventing and responding to sexual crimes. They should make protocols on collecting evidence of such crimes, prosecuting culprits properly and supporting the victims, aiming to push back the culture of impunity. The government also needs to train and control law enforcement officers as far too often, they themselves fail to respond properly, or are even complicit in sexual abuse. There are even several instances of females being subjected to sexual harassment and even rape by law enforcers.
We must learn something from neighbouring India as they dramatically tightened their laws on sexual assault and trafficking with far-stringent measures to satisfy public opinion in reaction to the horrific gang rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi a few years ago. The Indian government’s reaction showed their intention to take the issue very seriously.
The Bangladesh government is under the illusion that the laws already in place would make a difference in the sexual harassment of women and thus bring it down. It is high time the government realizes that however firm, the laws are useless if they are not enforced properly and culprits walk freely without the fear of accountability.