Md. Abrar Galib is a student of Economics at the University of Chittagong. His writing interests include politics, governance, economic affairs, and human rights. He can be reached at [email protected].
Somewhere tonight, another Bangladeshi man is finishing a shift he did not choose in a country that does not care to learn his name. What he has left goes to a mother who needs medicine, a sister who needs a wedding, a child who needs school fees. Somewhere tonight, a woman is working in a locked house, her phone in her employer’s hands, counting the days until her contract ends.
The most significant cost of Bangladesh’s new government pay scale may not be measured in government expenditure. It may be measured in incentives.
When a grown man rapes an 11-year-old and society's first instinct is to ask whether the girl was "of age," the problem is no longer just one predator. It is a collective willingness to call a psychiatric disorder a matter of taste.
The next government will also be tempted to inherit the same bargain: Loyalty in exchange for protection, administrative convenience in exchange for silence. Reform begins when a government chooses to give up that convenience. Until then, ministers will continue to fall while the permanent government learns to serve, and outlast, whoever replaces them.
We owe our daughters, sons and every future generation something better than inherited shame. We owe them safety. We owe them dignity. Let silence end where abuse begins, on our screens and in our streets; through words that challenge, actions that protect, and a resolve that no longer looks away.