What Bangladesh’s Overton window reveals about social attitude

Infograph: TBS

Bangladeshis are often described as socially conservative. The findings from the Jonomot Survey suggest that with some exceptions. 

Public opinion strongly favours several traditional and religious norms: retaining drug prohibition, preserving conventional family roles, closing restaurants during Ramadan, and maintaining religiously informed inheritance rules. But when it comes to child marriage, the picture changes sharply. Support for weakening restrictions is remarkably low.

That contrast matters as Bangladesh's social attitudes cannot be neatly placed on a single liberal–conservative spectrum. People may favour traditional moral and religious norms while drawing clear boundaries around what they believe society and the state should permit.

This is perhaps most visible in the case of child marriage, where sustained grassroots efforts to change attitudes appear to have helped make the issue an important exception to an otherwise strongly traditional social outlook.

Social attitudes: Conservative on moral order, selective on coercion

On several items in the social dimension, respondents express emphatically conservative views. 

Support is especially high for retaining drug prohibition, preserving traditional family roles, closing restaurants during Ramadan, and maintaining religiously inflected inheritance rules. These are majority-backed and, in some cases, overwhelming. The moral and religious content of the public sphere thus remains central to mass opinion in Bangladesh.

Yet the social battery is not homogeneous. Support for weaker child-marriage restrictions is very low, indicating that not all traditionalist positions command public acceptance. Support for surveillance and protest control is likewise more mixed than support for religious or family regulation. 

The public appears willing to endorse coercive authority in some domains but not others. This matters because it implies that the social dimension in Bangladesh is not well captured by a linear move from liberalism to conservatism. Rather, it combines moral traditionalism, selective acceptance of state coercion, and issue-specific limits on what majorities will tolerate.

Grassroots success in shifting public opinion on child marriage

One divergence in the social profile is particularly revealing: support for weakening restrictions on child marriage is extremely low. A plausible explanation lies in the history of public engagement with the issue.

Bangladesh has spent decades combating child marriage through legislation, national action plans, public awareness campaigns, adolescent clubs, educational support programs, helplines, and community mobilisation efforts involving parents, religious leaders, and local stakeholders. 

These initiatives have contributed to a gradual decline in child marriage rates. 

According to MICS 2025 data, 47.2% of women aged 20-24 were married before the age of eighteen, down from 51.4%  in 2019. 

Although child marriage remains widespread, particularly among poorer and rural households, public support for the practice appears to have fallen substantially, suggesting that long-term advocacy and awareness campaigns can reshape public attitudes even when social practices persist.

This also speaks to a broader methodological point about the relationship between public opinion and public discourse. 

Extreme views often receive disproportionate visibility on social media, where algorithms reward controversy and outrage. The survey evidence indicates that such views do not necessarily reflect majority opinion, a reminder that vocal minorities can distort the appearance of public sentiment. 

Sustained efforts on issues like child marriage should therefore continue, though declining donor funding means that NGOs, advocacy groups, and government agencies will need to develop new strategies and funding models to maintain progress.

Lack of ground mobilisation on the inheritance share for women

During the interim government's tenure, the Women's Affairs Reform Commission proposed equal inheritance rights for women, which would be optional for all communities as part of a broader package of family-law reforms, but strong opposition from religious groups prevented the proposal from advancing.

The Tunisian experience is relevant here. In 2018, President Béji Caïd Essebsi backed legislation that would have made equal inheritance the legal default while allowing families to opt for traditional Islamic provisions. 

Despite cabinet approval, conservative and Islamist groups strongly opposed the proposal in parliament. Several Muslim-majority countries, including Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, have enacted equal inheritance laws. 

Although child marriage remains widespread, particularly among poorer and rural households, public support for the practice appears to have fallen substantially, suggesting that long-term advocacy and awareness campaigns can reshape public attitudes even when social practices persist. This also speaks to a broader methodological point about the relationship between public opinion and public discourse. 

In Turkey, the change came through top-down secular civil-code adoption in 1926. In the case of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, equality came through Soviet-style secularisation of family/property law, later retained in post-independence civil codes where heirs inherit by kinship category, not gendered religious shares. However, practical implementation often remains constrained by social norms, family pressures, and informal arrangements. 

Taken together, these cases suggest that top-down reform in religiously sensitive domains tends to encounter substantial resistance, and that building public support through sustained grassroots engagement may be a more effective path than relying on legislative initiative alone.

The Overton Modules: Religion, the state, and sexual violence

The Overton analysis adds a second layer to the ideological map by shifting the focus from overall location to issue-specific public acceptability. The results strongly suggest that the window of acceptable opinion is not uniform across domains.

The state-and-religion battery reveals a striking combination of pluralist and majoritarian impulses. 

On the one hand, support for explicitly anti-religious or secularist positions is limited. Only 32.0% agree that there should be a separation of state and religion. On the other hand, support is overwhelming for the statement that Bangladesh should treat all religions equally, which receives 92.3% agreement. 

Yet this pluralist commitment coexists with very strong support for a privileged political role for religion: 74.2% agree that the majority religion should be prioritised in state affairs, and 68.5% agree that Bangladesh should be a theocratic state. 

The broad public acceptability window in this domain is therefore not secular. It is instead anchored in a blend of religious equality, majoritarian religious privilege, and substantial openness to an explicitly religious state. Among the public, these are not contradictory ideas.

The sexual-violence battery reveals a different but equally important pattern. 

A purely perpetrator-centred statement, that only the abuser is to blame, receives majority support at 63.5%. But this is not the dominant position in the battery. The highest agreement, at 88.4%, goes to the mixed statement that the abuser is to blame but women should also dress modestly and be careful outside. 

Similarly, 62.7%  agree that women's attire contributes to sexual violence, and 55.8% agree that excessive female empowerment is responsible. By contrast, only 42.1%  agree that patriarchal society is responsible for sexual violence. 

This is a sobering result. The public does not reject assigning blame to perpetrators, but that blame coexists with strong support for explanatory frames that place substantial responsibility on women, attire, and social change.

In other words, the broad acceptability window in this domain is not centred on a structural or feminist account of violence; it remains deeply shaped by victim-regulating and socially conservative narratives. Similar to the equal inheritance issue, changing public sentiment in this domain will require a substantial long-term whole-of-society approach.

In terms of the social dimension, this survey shows that the socially conservative parties can increase their appeal grounded in religious legitimacy, family order, and security by adopting a left-leaning economic agenda. 

At the same time, the Overton modules suggest that these moral and political commitments are not simple or internally consistent. The same respondents who overwhelmingly endorse equal treatment of religions also show broad openness to majoritarian religious privilege and theocratic rule. 

The same public that blames perpetrators for sexual violence also assigns substantial explanatory weight to women's conduct, attire, and empowerment. Public opinion is therefore not best understood as uniformly conservative or progressive, but as selectively structured by layered moral, economic, and order-based logics. 

This also offers insights for left-leaning, progressive political parties to try and shift public opinion on conservative-leaning social issues whilst centring the conversation on day-to-day economic issues such as affordability, inequality, and fair wages. 

Sheikh Rafi Ahmed, Graduate Student, Department of Economics, National University of Singapore, e-mail: asheikhrafi@gmail.com 

Tanjim Ul Islam, Graduate Student, Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, The Ohio State University, e-mail: tanjim2909@gmail.com 

Redoun Satter, Research Assistant, ARCED Foundation, e-mail: redounsatter1004@gmail.com 

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.