The culture before the crime: How social norms enable sexual violence

Between January and May 2024, Ain o Salish Kendra recorded 201 rape and gang rape cases, 134 child rape cases and 226 domestic violence incidents in Bangladesh. Over the same five-month period in 2025, these figures surged to 383, 266 and 251 cases respectively – a rapid escalation reflected in official records, media headlines and police dockets despite pervasive underreporting.

By the same period in 2026, documented cases stood at 239 for rape and gang rape, 139 for child rape and 183 for domestic violence. While the 2026 decline offers a superficial reprieve from the 2025 peak, the figures remain significantly higher than the 2024 baseline. Tracing this three-year arc reveals a troubling reality: gender-based violence in Bangladesh is an ongoing crisis that predates and outlasts any single year's fluctuations.

The concern extends beyond reported crimes. According to the 2024 Violence Against Women (VAW) survey, 76% of women said they had experienced some form of intimate partner violence at some point in their lives, yet two in every three survivors remained silent about their experiences.

Taken together, these figures are more than numbers on a page. While they cannot, on their own, establish causal relationships, they point to deeper structural problems and social conditions that merit closer scrutiny. Sexual violence against women and children in Bangladesh must be examined within the social and institutional conditions that enable it. Such violence is perpetuated by a broader environment of gender bias, unequal power structures, misogynistic attitudes, social silence and weak institutional accountability.

The social norm ecosystem

The normalisation of such violence cannot be understood without first examining the social norms that sustain it. Social norms are unwritten rules through which communities define what is acceptable, and they are reproduced daily in households, classrooms, workplaces and public transport.

Kelly conceptualised women's experiences of sexual harm as a continuum, beginning with seemingly ordinary behaviours such as invasive stares, comments and unwanted attention and extending to more severe forms of coercion and violence. This enabling environment was later described as "rape culture" – a social setting in which male sexual aggression is normalised and violence against women is treated as inevitable.

Beyond rhetoric, the term provides a lens through which to examine the patterned norms and institutional responses that trivialise harassment, excuse aggression or shift scrutiny from perpetrators to survivors. It does not suggest that every sexist joke or act of catcalling inevitably leads to rape. Rather, it explains how repeated boundary violations can weaken collective disapproval when they are minimised or left unsanctioned.

Sexism as social permission

Within this social norm ecosystem, humour can play a powerful role in setting the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. Prejudiced norm theory, developed by Ford and Ferguson, explains how jokes that demean a particular social group can help create an environment in which discrimination becomes gradually more acceptable.

Later experiments found that sexist humour increased tolerance of discriminatory behaviour, particularly among participants already inclined towards hostile sexism. A sexist joke in a workplace, classroom or social gathering can therefore contribute to an enabling environment. The more such behaviour is laughed off or left uncontested, the more it reinforces the notion that sexism is socially acceptable.

This pattern is visible in the private household as a workplace. Nazneen and Huq's study of young female domestic workers in Dhaka found that informal employment, dependence on employers, and norms surrounding women's sexuality and family honour constrained workers' responses to sexual harassment.

Victim blaming and the normalisation of male aggression meant that workers often relied on avoidance, negotiation or leaving their jobs rather than making formal complaints. In this setting, a sexualised remark or insinuation is not merely offensive language; it can carry disciplinary force because a worker's livelihood, mobility and reputation may depend on remaining silent.

Patriarchy and power

Sexist humour is not merely a matter of language, nor does it remain confined to casual remarks. Sexist jokes, harassment and violence are intertwined and are produced within a wider system of patriarchal power.

Walby describes patriarchy as a set of interconnected domains, including paid work, household labour, sexuality, culture, violence and the state, through which male dominance is maintained. Seen this way, violence against women is not an aberration from the patriarchal order; it is part of a wider system linked to patterns such as women's economic disadvantage and limited political power.

The more important question, therefore, is how society allows certain forms of domination to remain acceptable, invisible and under-addressed. The structure becomes visible in everyday relationships when unequal authority is exercised through restrictions on movement, work, money, communication and social contact.

Controlling behaviour within intimate relationships is a clear example of this process. Because it may not involve immediate physical force, it is often not recognised as coercion by the women experiencing it or by the systems meant to respond. Yet it matters as an enabling condition because it narrows autonomy, isolates survivors from support and establishes a pattern of entitlement before more visible forms of violence occur.

Comparative research associates controlling behaviour by intimate partners with a substantially higher likelihood of physical and sexual intimate partner violence. Bangladesh's 2024 survey illustrates the scale of the problem, with 67.6% of ever-married women reporting controlling behaviour by an intimate partner over their lifetime under the local-context measure.

The survivor's silence

When patriarchal domination becomes normalised, its impact extends beyond the violence itself and affects survivors' ability to disclose, seek care or report abuse.

The 2024 VAW survey found that 64% of survivors of physical or sexual violence by a husband had told no one. Nationally, only 49% of women aged 15 and older knew where to report violence, while only 12% knew about the government's 109 helpline.

In such a context, silence can be a rational response to a system that may punish disclosure more severely than the act itself.

Research shows that when survivors are blamed, doubted or ignored after speaking out, they may stop sharing their experiences, while their silence is then misread as evidence that no harm occurred.

The problem is compounded when formal justice appears unlikely to provide a timely or credible remedy. A joint Bangladesh Supreme Court and BRAC study analysed records of 4,040 cases disposed of between January and June 2025 across 32 districts within the Women and Children Repression Prevention Tribunal system.

Within that defined sample of disposed cases, 3% ended in conviction, 70% in acquittal and 13% through settlement; the average case lasted 1,370 days, or approximately 3.7 years. These percentages should not be generalised to all cases filed nationally, but they reveal serious procedural and accountability failures within the cases examined.

The disconnect between widespread violence and institutional impunity surfaced sharply in October 2020, when viral footage of an assault in Begumganj sparked mass protests across Bangladesh.

While the government responded by expanding the death penalty to rape cases, activists warned that harsher sentences would not dismantle the social silence and weak accountability that had allowed the crime to go unpunished for weeks. Their critique mirrors this article's central argument: punitive measures address the act itself but leave the structural norms that enable it largely untouched.

Children as the most vulnerable

This silence and weak accountability are even more dangerous for children, who occupy one of the most vulnerable positions within patriarchal structures. They are affected by the same gendered power structures that harm women, while also being constrained by the dependency and limited agency associated with childhood.

Finkelhor's Precondition Model identifies several conditions that allow child abuse to occur, most of which depend on the environment around the child rather than the child's actions. When supervision is weak, accountability is absent and children's voices are not taken seriously, the barriers meant to protect them begin to collapse.

Ain o Salish Kendra's January-to-May 2026 data recorded 139 reported child rape cases. Of these, 27 involved children aged six or younger, 60 involved children aged seven to 12, and 34 involved children aged 13 to 18. The source lists age as "not mentioned" for the remaining 18 cases, which explains why the three stated age groups total 121 rather than 139.

This missing age information is itself consequential because incomplete documentation limits age-specific prevention, referral and service planning.

The case for preventive action

For this reason, prevention must also operate at the social level because the underlying forces behind sexual violence are largely social rather than purely individual.

Bystander education has shown that communities can be trained to recognise harmful norms and intervene when those norms appear in everyday behaviour. If sexist humour can create tolerance for discrimination, then visible and repeated disapproval of sexist behaviour can help create the opposite norm – one in which harassment and misogyny are challenged rather than ignored.

This prevention logic is consistent with the RESPECT Women framework, which treats transformed attitudes, beliefs and norms as one component of a wider strategy that also includes relationship skills, women's empowerment, accessible services, poverty reduction, safer environments, and the prevention of child and adolescent abuse.

The implication is important: public messaging, legal punishment and survivor services cannot substitute for one another. Effective prevention requires all three to operate as a coordinated system.

Recommendations

The argument points to three immediate priorities.

First, social-norm change programmes should be funded and implemented alongside legal reform in workplaces, educational institutions, transport systems and community settings. These programmes should address sexist humour, victim blaming, coercive control and reputational sanctions, while measuring changes in perceived peer approval, willingness to intervene, confidence in reporting and institutional response.

Second, child protection systems should be evaluated through Unicef's Child Protection Systems Strengthening framework and the World Health Organization's INSPIRE monitoring and results framework. Together, these tools can assess whether supervision, referral pathways, confidential reporting, accountability, child participation and data systems are capable of preventing, detecting and responding to violence in practice.

Third, reporting and helpline mechanisms should be made clearer, more visible and easier to access, particularly because fewer than half of women know where to report violence and awareness of the 109 helpline remains low. Public communication should explain not only where to report, but also what happens after a report, what confidentiality protections apply, and which medical, legal, psychosocial and shelter services are available.

Institutional ownership must also be explicit. The Ministry of Women and Children Affairs should coordinate prevention and survivor-support policy. Police, prosecutors and tribunals should be accountable for survivor-centred investigation and timely case management. Educational institutions and employers should enforce safeguarding and complaint procedures. Local government should strengthen community referral and awareness, while civil society organisations should contribute survivor expertise, outreach and independent monitoring.

Each actor should have defined responsibilities, measurable indicators and a public reporting cycle.Together, these actions would move the response beyond punishment after violence occurs towards prevention, protection and accountability. Addressing sexual violence therefore requires transforming both the norms that legitimise unequal power and the institutions that fail to sanction its abuse.

Arsia Tabassum Kabbya is an Associate in the Gender and Basic Services Portfolio at Innovision Consulting. 

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.