The killing of seven-year-old Ramisa in Pallabi added one more name to a list whose length the state itself cannot agree on. Police Headquarters recorded 7,068 rape cases filed in 2025, up from 5,566 the year before. Data from Bangladesh Mahila Parishad (BMP) logged 786 rape and gang-rape victims for the same year, 543 of them children. Ain o Salish Kendra documented 776 rape cases during the thirteen months from 2025 to February 2026, nearly half of them minors. These figures are not directly comparable: police statistics count what reaches a police station, rights-group monitoring counts what reaches a newspaper, and household surveys capture what women disclose in private. The gap between them is the country’s real, unreported caseload. Three institutions, three totals, one shared trajectory pointing up—and a fourth, unknown figure no one tracks: the rapes never reported because the family was pushed to settle, the village arbitration in favour of the powerful, or the survivors who concluded that their safety lay in silence.
Therefore, the first failure is a data failure. A country cannot end a harm it does not measure. There is no public, real-time, division-level dashboard of violence against women and children in Bangladesh. Police data and rights-group data diverge by orders of magnitude, partly because the police record only what is formally filed. The 2024 Violence Against Women Survey, conducted by the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) with United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), found that 70 percent of women had experienced at least one form of intimate-partner violence in their lifetime. That national figure exists in a different universe from the 7,068 cases that reached the police stations.
Ain o Salish Kendra’s decadal documentation deepens the picture: across 2016–2025, ASK logged 11,735 verified incidents of violence against children, of which 5,537 were rape, and only 6,009 cases (about 51 percent) translated into a formal filing. Even within the rights-monitoring community, the numbers do not converge: BMP records 543 girls raped in 2025, while ASK’s children-specific series records 456 child rape cases for the same year—a 16 percent gap between two respected monitors using similar methods, and itself a measurement-infrastructure problem the state has chosen not to solve.
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Figure 1. Total reported incidents of violence against children, 2016–2026 (2026 covers January–April only). Source: Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK)
The arc traced by that decade tells a story of two surges separated by a four-year reprieve—a COVID-era peak of 1,718 incidents in 2020, a sustained decline through 2024, and a 52.8 percent rebound in 2025 that the partial 2026 figures already suggest will deepen.
Rape-specific filing rates fare better than the broader figures—averaging 72 percent over the decade and peaking at 84 percent in 2024. Yet, despite this seemingly strong follow-through, roughly one in four reported child rapes still perishes before ever seeing the inside of a courtroom.
The second failure is geographic. The State of Child Rights 2025 report, based on newspaper monitoring, found Dhaka division alone accounted for 2,376 child victims of crimes and accidents in 2025, with 298 children killed—the highest of any division. UNDP Bangladesh analysis has consistently placed Rajshahi among the top three divisions for gender-based violence, with Barishal climbing sharply since the pandemic. UNICEF data on child marriage—a structural precursor to sexual violence at home—show 56 percent of women in Barishal and 67 percent in Rajshahi were married as children. And the Chittagong Hill Tracts have become a geography of compounded impunity: a 2025 study found that only 5 of 17 documented rape cases involving Indigenous women in the CHT were formally filed with police. In other words, the country already has a hotspot map—drawn in fragments, by half-funded NGOs. The state has not produced one of its own.
This matters because resources flow where the data point. Without a published, geo-tagged hotspot register, additional Women and Children Repression Prevention Tribunals, women-led investigation cells, mobile forensic units and trained counsellors are deployed by political weight rather than by where children are being attacked. A government that means business on child protection should publish an annual, district-level hotspot map within the first 100 days of any term, attach a transparent funding formula to it, and require quarterly updates.
The third failure is moral and developmental—and the two have ceased to be separable. SDG Target 5.2 commits Bangladesh to “eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls.” Target 5.3 commits us to end child marriage. SDG Target 16.2 commits us to “end abuse, exploitation, trafficking and all forms of violence against and torture of children.” With fewer than five years to 2030, the country is not approaching these targets; it is moving away from them. UN agencies report that SDG 5 progress is globally off track, and Bangladesh’s own series—police, BMP, ASK, BBS—show that SDG 5 and 16.2 indicators are deteriorating in real time.
For the business community, this is not separate from growth. Every garment supplier audited by international buyers, every IT firm bidding for global contracts, every university chasing accreditation operates in a country whose social contract is fraying in public. Investor confidence, female labour-force participation, the remittance flows from a diaspora reading every new headline have a child-safety component the macro models still ignore.
First, treat data as infrastructure. Mandate a unified, public, district-level violence dashboard maintained jointly by the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs and BBS, with an independent oversight panel that includes BMP, ASK and Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust (BLAST). Reconcile the gap between police filings and survey-based prevalence in an annually published report. Second, designate hotspot zones and fund them as such. Districts and upazilas with the highest incidence across all measurement frames should receive ring-fenced budgets for additional tribunals, women-led investigation cells, 24-hour one-stop crisis centres, and survivor shelters. The CHT require a specific, indigenous-rights-sensitive protocol developed with community leaders, not imposed on them.
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Figure 2. The justice gap: reported child-violence incidents versus cases formally filed, 2016–2025. Filing rate = cases filed ÷ total reported incidents. Source: Ain o Salish Kendra (ASK)
Third, fold child protection into the SDG accountability stack. Every Voluntary National Review submitted to the UN High-Level Political Forum should publish, alongside the GDP and inflation series, the conviction rate under the Women and Children Repression Prevention Act, broken down by division. A country willing to publish its current-account deficit can publish its child-safety deficit. Fourth, restore social morale by restoring social justice. A state that declines to count children who were abused, then asks them to feel safe, has misunderstood what morale is. Morale is downstream of seeing that the system works—that a complaint is filed, that an investigation finishes, that a conviction follows. Without those, every pledge of “zero tolerance” corrodes public trust further.
A child’s life cannot be priced in basis points. But the cost of failing to protect that life can be—and Bangladesh is paying it now, in lost lives, lost potential, lost investor confidence, and a slow corrosion of the social compact no balance sheet captures. The next budget speech that does not name this crisis will tell us, more honestly than any GDP figure, what kind of state we have become.
Professor Dr Mohammad Nurunnabi is director of the Center for Sustainability and Climate and associate dean for Quality Assurance at Prince Sultan University, Saudi Arabia, and an academic visitor at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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