08/03/2026
Flowers for the Living, Silence for the Dead
Every March 8, the world lights up. Timelines fill with purple. Speeches are made. Tributes are posted. Bangladesh joins in too - organisations issue statements, individuals share wishes, and for one day, the air feels thick with talk of empowerment and progress.
But if you look past the posts, something uncomfortable sits underneath all of it.
While we are busy celebrating women, women in this country are being r***d, beaten, and killed. Not as statistics from some distant past, but right now, this week, today. And that gap, between the celebration and the reality is something we need to sit with, rather than scroll past.
A child who could not have been older than seven was r***d and left in a bush with her throat cut open. She was found alive. She had somehow pulled herself out of the place where she was left to die. But the damage was done. She did not survive. And when a country processes that kind of news, holds it for a day or two, lights some candles, trends a hashtag, and then moves on, you have to wonder what we actually mean when we say we value women and children.
Because we clearly do not value them enough.
There was another girl, this time killed by her own stepfather. Not in a moment of rage, not in the chaos of some random crime, but deliberately, to hide what he had done to her. He abused her, and then he killed her to make sure no one would know. The crime was terrible. The calculation behind it was something else entirely. It tells you how little consequence some men fear, and how little protection some girls can count on.
Closer to home, in the most literal sense, women are being killed by their husbands. Inside their own houses. A woman was reportedly killed by her husband just yesterday. This is not a new pattern. Domestic violence in Bangladesh is so common, so woven into ordinary life, that most of it never reaches a headline. It stays behind walls, swallowed by shame and the quiet pressure to keep family matters private. The women who die in those walls rarely become stories.
And then there is something that might sound smaller, but isn't. Reports circulated this week of a man travelling on public buses and rickshaws, cutting women's hair. Silently, from behind. Women would sit down, travel a few stops, and discover too late that their hair had been sliced off. He was reportedly caught with several braids already in his bag. To some, this sounds almost absurd; a strange, petty thing. But there is nothing petty about it. It is a man deciding that a woman's body, even her hair, is something he can take without asking. It is harassment dressed up as something almost too odd to take seriously, which is precisely how it gets away with continuing.
Put all of these things together and you get a picture that no Women's Day graphic is able to cover.
The problem is not just the individual men who commit these acts. The problem is a culture that still treats women's safety as negotiable, something to address when it becomes too loud to ignore, and forget about when the noise dies down. Our institutions are part of this. Our laws exist, but enforcement is inconsistent. Justice is slow, and for many victims, it never comes at all.
None of this means we should not celebrate women. Bangladesh has women who lead, build, create, and persist under conditions that would break most people. They deserve recognition every day, not just one.
But recognition without honesty is just flattery. And flattery does not keep anyone safe.
If Women's Day is going to mean anything real, it has to be more than a moment of goodwill. It has to be a moment of reckoning, with the violence that goes unreported, the justice that goes undelivered, and the silence that protects perpetrators far more reliably than it protects victims.
The measure of how much a society values its women is not in the warmth of its March 8 posts. It is in whether a girl can walk home alone and arrive safely. It is in whether a woman can sleep in her own house without fear of the person next to her. It is in whether a father who reports his daughter's r**e can stay alive long enough to see the case through.
We are not there yet. We are far from it. And the least we can do, on a day that asks us to honour women, is to be honest about that.
-OP-ED The People
