Bangladesh to Introduce Capital Punishment for Rapists
Geneviève Nolet, Online Staff Writer
October 26, 2020
Map of Capital Punishment Laws of the World
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons, The Rim of the Sky
Following public outrage regarding several recent high-profile rape cases, the Bangladeshi government has announced the introduction of the death penalty for perpetrators convicted of rape.
This decision comes after a group of men affiliated with the ruling Awami League’s party were accused of gang-raping a woman who was visiting the premises of Sylhet Murari Chand college with her husband back in September. More recently, footage of a group of men violently attacking and gang-raping a woman in the Noakhali district was released on Facebook to shame and blackmail the victim. Eight people have since been arrested in relation to the incident.
Both cases sparked protests in the capital, Dhaka and across the nation, calling for the government to take action in addressing the issue of pervasive sexual violence in Bangladesh. The demonstrators claimed that Bangladeshi women are too often let down by their government’s inaction as the justice system grants impunity to the perpetrators, contributing to a normalization of violence towards women and dissuading victims from reporting sexual violence related crimes to the authority. Many protestors requested faster trials while others wielded signs calling for the punishment of rapists through death penalty. Some even constructed a mock gallows in Dhaka.
Prior to the amendment introducing the death penalty for rapists, which was enacted Tuesday, October 13, of this year, the Women and Children Repression Prevention Act’s highest sanction punished those convicted of rape with life imprisonment. Earlier this year, the country’s High Court had called for the establishment of a commission to investigate the increasingly endemic issue of sexual violence against women. Now nine months later, it remains uncertain whether or not the commission ever came to be.
A women’s right organization Naripokkho reports that between 2011 and 2018, merely five in 4,372 assault cases resulted in a conviction, and that only 3.56% of cases made it to court while 0.37% resulted in convictions. This issue has been exacerbated by the ongoing pandemic. Since January, over a thousand cases of rape were reported in Bangladesh, although it is likely that countless more went unreported. Of these, more than a fifth were gang rapes and over 40 of the victims died. According to the Dhaka Tribune, this represents an average of four daily victims of rape over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Although public reaction to the Bangladeshi government’s amendment has been mainly positive, opting for the death penalty is not the best response to counter widespread rape. Threatening perpetrators with capital punishment is unlikely to result in a significant drop in the incidence of rape cases. According to Amnesty International South Asian Researcher, Sultan Mohammed Zakaria, “this regressive step is a fig leaf that deflects attention from the lack of real action to address the appalling brutality faced by so many Bangladeshi women. Executions perpetuate violence, they don’t prevent it.” He encourages the Bangladeshi government to implement changes that would allow women and girls to feel comfortable reporting crimes to the authority and to hold the criminals accountable rather than granting them impunity. South Asian Director at Human Rights Watch, Meenakshi Ganguly urges the Bangladesh government “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 Bangladeshi government should focus its efforts into training police forces to take gender-based violence reports in a fair and compassionate way that validates the victims’ experiences, rather than subjecting them to victim-blaming, stigmatization and humiliation. Students should be educated on the importance of consent and on ways in which they can help dismantle the current misogynistic systems. Rapists should be brought to court and held accountable for their actions, and the whole judicial process should be sped up. Protection and legal aid should be provided for victims and witnesses, who are currently reluctant to testify due to harassment and death threats.
The Bangladeshi penal code also needs to be updated to include marital rape and to implement legal protection for men, boys, transgender people, hijra and/or intersex victims of sexual assault. No legislation will be able to undo the harm that has already been done. As such, the Bangladeshi people and government must establish support programs for survivors that allow them to access psychological and social counselling.