Bangladesh government should form a High Court-ordered commission on sexual violence and publicly report its recommendations; provide comprehensive sexuality education in schools, including on the meaning of consent; and provide training to law enforcement and court officials on working with victims of gender-based violence, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Friday in a news release.
HRW also said that it should ensure that adequate and accessible resources for psychosocial support are available and accessible and should heed activists’ calls to finally pass a bill against sexual harassment, provide witness protection and reform discriminatory legislation.
The global rights group said, in 2009, the High Court issued a judgment providing detailed guidelines governing sexual harassment in all workplaces and educational institutions. As stipulated by the guidelines, all workplaces and educational institutions should have dedicated committees to prevent sexual harassment and respond to complaints. Yet over a decade later, these guidelines are rarely implemented, and the government has yet to finalize a draft bill.
The government has yet to pass long-promised sexual harassment and witness protection laws. Survivors continue to face stigma and do not have adequate access to psychosocial services when they seek help, HRW said today.
The attackers are rarely held to account. The conviction rate for rape in Bangladesh is below 1 per cent. A 2013 UN multi-country survey found that among men in Bangladesh who admitted to committing rape, 88 per cent of rural respondents and 95 per cent of urban respondents said that they had faced no legal consequences, according to the HRW statement.
In its concluding observations in the most recent report on Bangladesh’s compliance with the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the CEDAW Committee found that “existing rules, policies, and plans addressing gender-based violence against women are rarely implemented due to stereotypes and gender bias, and lack of gender sensitivity on the part of law enforcement officials,” the HRW release mentioned.
In 2018, the Bangladesh High Court ruled that police had delayed recording the complaint of a woman who was gang-raped on a microbus in Dhaka in 2015 and issued guidelines for handling rape cases. These included taking the victim’s statement in the presence of a social worker, designating female officers at police stations to receive complaints, providing support for victims with disabilities, and criminalizing police failure to register a case without sufficient cause. But these guidelines are rarely followed and there appears to be no mechanism to hold accountable police who ignore them, said the global rights group.
The HRW statement continued to read: "If they are able to file a case, survivors are further deterred by long, drawn-out court cases, pressure from public officials and the accused to drop cases and abusive questioning in court. Lawyers and rights groups have repeatedly called for the repeal of section 155(4) of the Evidence Act 1872, which states that “When a man is prosecuted for rape or an attempt to ravish, it may be shown that the prosecutrix was of generally immoral character.” This provision encourages defence lawyers to denigrate the character of women if they pursue criminal charges, a clear disincentive to survivors to step forward."
These problems are compounded because Bangladesh has no witness protection law, meaning that survivors pursuing legal remedies and those willing to testify on their behalf risk serious threats, harassment, and even death. A Witness Protection Act was drafted by the Bangladesh Law Commission in 2006, but it has yet to be passed into law. Nearly 90 per cent of legal practitioners surveyed by the country’s 2018 Justice Audit said that the measures to protect vulnerable witnesses and victims of crime, especially women and girls, were inadequate, HRW said.
“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,” He added.
“The Bangladesh government needs to listen to women,” Ganguly said.
“The government should ensure that this woman, and all sexual assault survivors, are treated with dignity and have access to services and that their right to a fair, timely, independent investigation and adequate legal remedy is respected,” she added.
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