The last two years have seen a sharp decline in women’s safety, both in physical and digital spaces. Women discuss the culture of compliance that impacts their lives.
There was a time when cat-calling, eve-teasing and harassment were only limited to public spaces. With the rise of technology and social media usage, harassment has found its way from streets to screens.
Online harassment is a pervasive problem for women across the world and it can take many forms such as stalking, cyberbullying, impersonation, threats; and often spills over from digital spaces into real life, creating permanent emotional and social consequences.
Girls face harassment when they are as young as adolescents and teenagers and it escalates as they grow older. In Bangladesh women suffer more due to cultural stigma that often silences victims where the blame and shame is often shifted to the victim rather than the perpetrator. Calling out harassment seems to invite more harassment whether it be from school, university or workplace authority.
“I experienced this firsthand as a teenager. Harassment was sustained and escalating, at one point including threats to my life. It made me hyper-vigilant, disrupted my daily life, and showed me early that being visible as a female, whether online or on the streets or in the workplace, often comes at a cost.” said Nuzhat Minhaz, product manager at Microsoft CoreAI and the founder of PrivaC Bangladesh, a cybercrime countermeasure service.
For Erina Islam (pseudo name) whose harassment started many years ago by an unknown attendee at a former workplace event. He eventually became a long-term stalker, she was regularly stalked online and offline and it affected her considerably. “I needed copious amounts of therapy to move past it. I didn’t go into the office for a long time after he showed up at my new workplace which he found out from LinkedIn. Even after reporting it to the police, there was no action taken, rather they tried to mediate it through an apology. My workplace played off the security breach at the office premises by saying he must have gotten my information from anywhere.” Since then, Erina has made all her social handles private, she never posts her location or plans in real time.
Telling women to minimise what they post or share indicates that their lives are better off on the sidelines. It tells them their education, careers, creativity, and social presence are not vital enough to protect. This approach doesn’t stop harassment but really entices the harasser and their association, who know that women are less likely to come forward because of the culture of victim blaming.
Nuzhat shares that being a survivor herself, she was motivated to help others. “I studied cybersecurity and founded PrivaC Bangladesh at 19 so that no other woman would experience what I did. We’ve handled over 300 traumatic cases — including non-consensual recordings and revenge pornography — successfully taking many to court despite limited cyber laws in the country.”
Platforms need reporting systems that are transparent, trauma-informed, and actually usable. And society needs to confront misogyny directly, because cultural and social stigma determines whether women report abuse at all. It is evident that the government needs stronger and more enforceable cyber laws that go beyond surface-level offences. Without legal reform, platform accountability, and cultural change happening together, the number of victims will rise exponentially.
The most compelling justice served to a harasser in recent times was when the popular actress Sabnam Faria called out her harasser on social media and his workplace immediately fired him. She shares, “It is unfortunate but we have accepted that when people are on a social platform, there will be good and bad comments. However, when people cross their limits and do something vile, that cannot be excused. Silence can encourage harassers. Sadly, these incidents have increased drastically in the last three or four years. Social media was not hostile before.” She said that filing a formal complaint is often a lengthy process. “No law can reform the harmful mentality of people, rather there is an urgency for a curriculum in schools so that children are taught ethics, morals and boundaries from a young age.”