Kazi Maruful Islam: This is a terrifying manifestation of the deepest crisis within our social and legal structures. We understand the reasons behind this intense public outrage—it stems from judicial delays and the undue influence of power. These factors have caused people to lose faith in the courts. But rendering the legal system ineffective can never be a solution.
We must understand that mob justice is not justice at all rather it is a violent advertisement of the failure of the institutional justice system. Put another way, it is a form of organised violence. Whenever we take the law into our own hands, we do not punish the criminal — instead, we turn the state itself into a criminal.
An agitated crowd does not care about evidence or legal procedures. As a result, an entirely innocent person can also become victims of digital lynching due to rumours or personal vendettas. We are seeing disturbing levels of slut-shaming and hate speech against women spreading on Facebook around rape incidents. This is deeply unfortunate and reflects a form of psychological distortion.
When, instead of placing the perpetrator in the dock, social media turns the victim woman’s clothing or lifestyle into the subject of public trial, it becomes clear that the criminal is not alone — society itself has mentally become complicit in the crime. Cyberbullying and mob justice divert people’s attention away from the central issue of the crime— the rape itself.
What is unfortunate is that our laws for combating digital crime are often used to suppress political dissent, yet we do not see the, enforced strictly enough to prevent this kind of hate speech and character assassination against women online.
Factually, we need to ask why such heinous crimes as rape are taking place in society; what changes within society are encouraging or emboldening people to commit such crimes. Taking the law into one’s own hands, or encouraging others to do so, effectively amounts to endorsing violence. Rape itself is an extreme form of violence. One form of violence fuels another and helps normalise it.
For now, a possible short-term solution would be to make the entire process — from investigation to verdict — more victim-friendly, while increasing both the number and capacity of judges in the Women and Children Repression Prevention Tribunals to reduce the backlog of cases.
