Kazi Zahidul Hasan :
People are taking to social media to demand “justice” after a series of cases of violence against women sparked outrage in the country.
The latest outpouring of anger has been unleashed in the wake of the Sylhet MC college gang rape and assaults on a woman in Noakhali.
Besides, a ‘black dot’ campaign on social media went viral after people launched it protesting crimes against women in the country.
The campaign is trending across the country, with thousands of students and women replacing their profile pictures to a black dot on Facebook.
Terming the campaign as a ‘movement,’ the facebook users said this black dot is a mark of collective protest against rape cases and collective mourning at the loss of humanity. “It is a movement to show what the world might be without women. Your profile photo should just be a black dot so that men wonder where women are. Pass it only to women denouncing woman abuse,” caption of the profile picture reads.
Shilpi Hossain, who blacked out her FB profile photo with a back dot to register strong protest against frequent rape incidents all over the country, made the comment, “Stop rape, save women. We want justice.”
One facebook user Shama Arzu also joined the protest saying, “I have not thought what male consider about my black out, black dots, but my main focus is to show solidarity with the movement.”
Like them many of the women and even men also changed their Facebook profile pictures to the black dot to express outrage over the sexual assault cases and express solidarity with the victims.
On the night of September 25, a woman was gang-raped by Chhatra League men at a hostel of the Murari Chand (MC) College in Sylhet. A group of six or seven culprits dragged the woman into the dormitory and raped her after beating and tying up her husband when the couple went to visit the college at Tilagarh area in the evening, police said.
Being informed, police rescued the couple from the dormitory area around 10:30 pm and admitted the victim to the One-Stop Crisis Centre at Sylhet MAG Osmani Medical College and Hospital.
A group of young men in Noakhali’s Begumganj area broke into the 35-year-old woman’s room and tortured her after stripping her naked and filming it on the night of September 2. They had demanded money and made lewd propositions to the woman by threatening to spread the video on social media. They later went into hiding after the video went viral a month later.
Both the incidents have sparked public outrage across the country and now it is spilling over on social media.
“These incidents are not isolated ones. Thousands cases of woman abuses are taking place across the country every day and most of those cases remain unreported,” a woman rights activist told The New Nation on Tuesday preferring not to be named.
She said a culture of impunity is leading to recurrence of incidents of rape and sexual violence against women in the country.
“Rape has become a social endemic. We have to raise our voice now to root the menace out. Otherwise, it will cause long-term damage for the nation,” she added.
