(New York) – Protests in Bangladesherupted this week after a video of a group of men attacking, stripping, and sexually assaulting a woman went viral, Human Rights Watch said today. Protesters called for the resignation of Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal over the government’s failure to address an alarming rise in sexual violence against women and girls.
“Bangladeshi women have had enough of the government’s abject failure to address repeated rapes and sexual assaults,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The Bangladesh government needs to finally make good on its empty promises and heed activists’ calls to take meaningful action to combat sexual violence and to support survivors.”
The attackers shown in the video apparently included a man who had allegedly raped the woman in the video at gunpoint multiple times over the last year, based on an investigation by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC). “Whenever the woman protested or refused, she was threatened with gang-rape by his whole team,” said Al Mahmud Faizul Kabir, the commission’s investigation director. The woman told the media that the men had filmed the assault and then threatened for over a month to release the video in an effort to extort money from her and to compel her to comply with their demands for sex. When she resisted, they released the video.
Though the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission has sought to remove the video from the internet, it continues to circulate widely. “My life is already ruined,” the survivor told the media. “I am now worried about my children, especially my daughter.”
Eight men have been arrested in the case. But protesters called for the government to finally take the country’s sexual assault problem seriously. According to Ain o Salish Kendra, a Bangladeshi human rights organization, 907 women or girls were raped in just the first nine months of 2020. Over 200 of these cases were gang rape. Since these numbers are based on media reports and most survivors do not report assault, they most likely capture only a small fraction of the true number of cases of sexual violence against women and girls in Bangladesh.