Every generation inherits new rights to defend. This Human Rights Day, Bangladesh confronts a frontier expanding faster than laws or institutions can manage: the digital world.
What once promised connection and empowerment has become a terrain where women face hostility, humiliation, and targeted abuse. Digital abuse is no small inconvenience. It violates privacy, dignity, bodily autonomy, freedom of expression, and equal participation.
The UN, including UN Women and UNDP, states clearly that "online harassment is violence -- and a human rights violation".
With artificial intelligence in the mix, people no longer need personal content to weaponise a woman's image. A single photograph is enough.
As Supreme Court lawyer Priya Ahsan Chowdhury noted, "With AI, it has become very easy to create fake or sexually suggestive images -- even if offenders don't have any personal photos."
THE SCALE OF THE CRISIS
Last December, social media was flooded with an AI-generated photocard dragging Environment Adviser Syeda Rizwana Hasan and actress Mehazabien Chowdhury into fabricated controversy, falsely showing Mehazabien in an "environment-friendly condom dress" and implying the adviser had endorsed it.
Such distortion is part of a larger pattern.
The Violence Against Women Survey 2024 shows that 8.3 percent of women, particularly young and urban women, have already faced technology-facilitated violence. A NETZ Bangladesh study found 78.4 percent of young, digitally active women encountered harassment ranging from threats and coercion to the non-consensual use of their images.
These numbers represent lives shaped by fear of what someone online might do next.
For women in the public eye, abuse often begins the moment they post a photograph or opinion. Actresses such as Rafiath Rashid Mithila, Ashna Habib Bhabna, Nusraat Faria, and Azmeri Haque Badhan have spoken about the unrelenting stream of sexualised insults they receive.
When Bhabna once captioned a photo "99+" to highlight the number of abusive comments she got in a week, some replied with "Tasted 99, one more will make a century" or "Is 99 your body count?".
Women in sports face similar vitriol. Cricketer Rumana Ahmed said negative comments and rumours affect performance, especially when strangers invent stories about her personal life during even brief dips in form.
Shooter Kamrun Nahar Koly described targeted trolling before competitions and harassment from fake accounts that may even be linked to people within sports communities. "Not knowing who is behind the attacks makes the pressure even heavier," she said.
Footballer Ritu Porna Chakma recalled drawing a match and immediately being told to "give up football" or "go and become a TikToker". "One bad game, and they say things that can be quite unbearable."
LAWS EXIST, PROTECTION DOESN'T
Bangladesh's Cyber Protection Ordinance 2025 criminalises AI-generated or manipulated sexual images, but protection remains largely theoretical.
Investigations often stall because forensic capacity is limited and metadata is missing. Many survivors withdraw complaints due to stigma; many never file one at all.
Offenders, meanwhile, adapt faster than institutions.
Police officials, including AIG (Media) AHM Shahadat Hossain, acknowledge that shame and fear prevent many women from seeking justice. The gap between legal text and lived experience grows wider each year.
NOT JUST A WOMEN'S ISSUE
Digital harassment is often minimised as something women should ignore or manage alone. But this is no trivial matter to just "ignore".
It undermines autonomy, restricts movement, distorts career paths, damages mental health, and forces self-censorship -- it denies women full participation in public and private life.
The right to exist online without humiliation is now as fundamental as the right to walk down a street safely, and when technology becomes a tool for silencing women, it becomes a human rights issue.
Meaningful action requires more than symbolic laws. Bangladesh needs stronger forensic capability, faster content removal across platforms, survivor-centred reporting systems, and better training for police and judges. But what it needs more is a cultural shift that refuses to blame survivors and recognises digital safety as inseparable from gender equality.
Until every woman can step into digital spaces without fear of being hunted, mocked, manipulated, or erased, our commitment to human rights will remain incomplete.
(The Daily Star's reporter Nilima Jahan, Sports reporters Samsul Arefin Khan and Anisur Rahman, and Arts and Entertainment reporters Sharmin Joya and Rakshanda Rahman Misha contributed.)
