They Offered Chocolate, Then Took Their Lives

In March, seven-year-old Jannatun Nayema Ira was lured away with chocolate by a 50 year old neighbour named Babu Sheikh. He took her by bus to a remote hill inside Sitakunda Eco Park, attempted to rape her, and when she screamed and threatened to tell her family, he slit her throat and left her to bleed out alone.

She was found by labourers, barely conscious. She survived long enough to reach the ICU at Chattogram Medical College Hospital. She did not survive long enough to go home.

In April, a seven-year-old girl named Ireen was lured, again with chocolate, by a local easy-bike driver named Israfil Mridha in Faridpur. He strangled her when she threatened to tell her mother, then stuffed her body into a septic tank. She was found four days later from the smell.

Again this Tuesday, eight-year-old Ramisa Akhter -- the top student in her class, whose academic trophies sat carefully arranged at home -- wandered next door to the flat of a neighbour who had moved in only two months earlier. Her mother heard her scream. She came out and found Ramisa's shoes outside the man's door.

When police broke it down, they found Ramisa's decapitated body beneath a bed and her severed head inside the bathroom. The man had already fled. He was arrested the same evening in Narayanganj. The family had lived in that building for seventeen years.

Three girls. Three neighbours or familiar faces. Three deaths separated by barely two months. And the question that sits in the chest like a stone, one that no amount of police press briefings or political statements can dissolve: In 2026, is there anyone we can actually trust around our children?

The statistics behind these cases offer no reassurance. According to UNICEF's monitoring, from January 2025 to mid-March 2026, approximately fifty cases of child rape were recorded by media and local human rights organisations in Bangladesh.

On a single Monday in March 2026, seven children were killed and six confirmed cases of violence were reported — in one day. 

Police Headquarters data shows that murder cases rose 14% in the first quarter of 2026 compared to the same period the year before, with 317 murders registered in March alone.

What makes this moment so suffocating is not just the volume of the violence but the pattern embedded within it. In all three cases above, the perpetrator was a known face -- a neighbour, a local driver, the man from the next flat.

In two cases the approach was something as innocent as chocolate. In every case involving a known attacker, the child's instinct to resist or report was met with lethal force.

These men did not panic. They calculated. They silenced. And in almost every instance they attempted to conceal -- bodies in septic tanks, heads in bathrooms. This is not rage. This is premeditation wearing the mask of ordinary neighbourhood life.

It forces an admission that cuts deeper than any crime statistic: The threat to our children is not lurking at the fringes of society. It is living next door. It has a face we recognise. It offers chocolate.

There was a time, not so distant in memory, when Bangladeshi families sent children to neighbours without a second thought. When a child could walk to a relative's house alone.

When the village or the mahalla functioned as a distributed system of watchfulness and mutual accountability -- imperfect, certainly, but functional.

Families at the time were embedded in communities that knew their children by name, that would notice if something was wrong, that held its members to informal but real standards of conduct.

That world is gone. And we have not fully reckoned with what we lost when it went.

The paradox is hard to miss, and harder to sit with.

The world is more modern than it has ever been. Bangladesh now has CCTV cameras, DNA forensics, digital tracking, rapid police communication networks.

Babu Sheikh was identified through footage within hours of the crime. The getaway vehicle in another recent case was traced digitally within days. The tools of detection have never been more powerful. And yet, children today are less safe.

The inference is unavoidable: the problem is not a deficit of technology. It is a deficit of something older and less measurable -- the internal restraint, rooted in community and conscience, that once made such acts unthinkable for most people, not merely risky.

That restraint does not survive urbanisation automatically. When people move from villages to apartment blocks in cities and towns, they carry their furniture but not their communities.

They gain neighbours but lose neighborhoods. The social fabric -- the web of mutual visibility, shared norms, informal accountability -- frays in the anonymity of dense city living.

In that fraying, something predatory finds room to breathe. A man can move into the flat beside a family, stay two months, be seen on the staircase every day, and no one truly knows him. That is not merely a security failure. It is a civilizational symptom.

The deepest grief in all of this is that the children had no part in creating any of it. Ira did not choose to live near Babu Sheikh. Ireen did not choose the road she walked on. Ramisa did not choose her neighbour.

They were children, which means they were still at the stage of life when trust is the default -- when the world is taken at face value, when a man who offers chocolate is simply a man who offers chocolate.

The predators in these cases did not just take lives. They weaponised innocence itself.

Where does this lead? If the first months of 2026 are a signal rather than an anomaly, the Bangladesh of 2050 may be a place where childhood as a state of relative freedom -- the freedom to walk to the corner shop, to visit a cousin, to exist in one's own neighbourhood without an escort -- is functionally over.

That is not alarmism. It is arithmetic applied to a trend line. The children of 2050 will not understand what was lost, because they will never have known it. That may be the most devastating part of all.

There are things that can and must be done: Fast-track tribunals for child rape and murder cases, mandatory safety education in schools focused on the consistent patterns of enticement these cases reveal, a genuine rebuilding of community oversight structures at the ward and mahalla level, and unsparing enforcement of the Women and Children Repression Prevention Act.

But all of this requires a prior commitment -- a collective decision that this is unacceptable not only when a particular case goes viral, but as a sustained, institutional posture that does not wait for the next headline.

Ira and Ireen and Ramisa were not symbols. They were children. Now they are gone. The least we owe them -- the very least -- is to refuse to let their deaths become background noise.

Jannatul Naym Pieal is a Dhaka-based writer, researcher and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected].