And Still The Man Stays Unscathed
All in a week's work. March has barely started. We already have five men (at least) raping, assaulting and killing the women they thought were below them.
This month isn't special of course – a glance through any month of the calendar gives similar numbers. The last day of February delivered an injured 15-year-old hacked indiscriminately by her boyfriend for refusing marriage. At the same time, a 16-year-old laid in the burn unit of Rajshahi Medical College Hospital, hooked to life support with two front teeth missing. She was tortured for dowry.
In some of these cases the victims had dared to question the authority of men and paid dearly for it. For example, the case in Mymensingh where all Fatema Khatun had done was get out of a bad marriage. Her husband ambushed and stabbed her. Or the case of Nazma Begum, who just didn't want to live with all four of her husband's other wives. In the other cases these women belonged to the most vulnerable portion of society – like the physically challenged 12-year-old.
But the men, the men were all the same. They were all men who felt a sense of entitlement and acted upon it.
Maybe newspapers can just cut to the chase and start publishing these stories under a heading called “Victims of Male Entitlement”. There seem to be enough of them every day to populate an entire section anyway.
But the article today is not about numbers. It's about figuring out how exactly a 62-year-old man can take a speech and hearing-impaired child to a field - a child young enough to be his granddaughter - and rape her.
The answer probably lies in what happened next.
The rapist's cronies did not allow the child to be taken to the hospital, the victim's parents told The Daily Star correspondent. No case was filed either. A local community leader told the reporter that the matter will be settled through arbitration.
If you haven't figured out what the answer is it is this - violence by men is justified and excused and so, not only do men think that they can get away with it, they think that they are entitled to it.
That is why Suruzzaman Miah had the courage to rape that child. It's because the people around him taught him everything will be okay in the end.
Of course now we have to add the word 'allegedly' before the word 'rape'. Seeing that our very patriarchal society ensured that no case was filed, the entire validity of the victim's experience has been jeopardised forever.
The man stays unscathed.
I can imagine what they told her parents to keep her from receiving medical attention, or from filing a case.
I'll wager it's the same thing that that random person on the street told me in Mohakhali that other day, when I was yelling at a man for passing lewd comments while I walked by.
“Be quiet and save your dignity. Let it be,” he said.
Numerous women across the world were probably hearing the same sentence directed towards them on the exact same day. This, after all, is the most common reaction when women dare to speak out against injustices, against men using their bodies for sexual crimes.
That person asking me to be quiet gave the oppressor arsenal. The oppressor gained validation from the crowd in the street and rose to claim his entitlement to sexually subdue women.
“You can understand what type of a girl she is by how she drew attention to herself on the street,” he said.
The other most common reaction heard by women when they speak up. It's a reaction that reduces the women's experiences to 'she was asking for it' and gives the men's actions legitimacy.
So the men keep quiet about other men and the women are made to keep quiet, and a crime travels from being a passing comment on the street to full-blown rape in a tobacco field.
And a 12-year-old girl who is forced to keep quiet because she cannot talk or hear becomes the ultimate sacrifice at that altar.
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