I REMEMBER a few years ago when Bangladesh won a major cricket match, with one of our players taking an extraordinary number of wickets. It was a moment of collective pride, the kind that cuts across class, politics and everyday divisions. I happened to be at the ground that day and managed to take a photograph with the star player. Like millions of others who mark national moments online, I shared the photo on social media, hoping simply to join the celebration.
What followed was not celebration at all.
My comments section filled rapidly, not with congratulations or shared joy, but with harassment and abuse. Among the flood of swear words and accusations, one refrain appeared again and again: it was women like me, they said, who would lead to the downfall of our players.
Let that settle. I was celebrating a national victory, and that alone was enough to make me a target.
This was neither the first nor the last time I would experience digital harassment. For countless women in Bangladesh, online abuse is a routine condition of visibility. The assault is often more visible when women are in the public eye, but it spares no one. Woman-bashing has effectively been transformed into an online sport, especially when it can be carried out from behind screens, sheltered by anonymity and distance.
This reality is something we witness every day at Radio Shadhin, Bangladesh’s first advocacy-focused radio station. Women in the public sphere — journalists, activists, artists, entrepreneurs, public figures — are subjected to relentless abuse. And we realised that if this reality was to be confronted meaningfully, it had to be made impossible to ignore.
Making invisible visible
IN MID-NOVEMBER last year, a series of unusual social media posts began circulating. A well-known model appeared with the number seven written across her face. A respected actor posted an image marked with the number nine. Another woman used the infinity symbol, she had stopped counting altogether. The posts prompted confusion, curiosity and conversation. What did these numbers mean?
Each number represented something disturbingly familiar to women, yet largely invisible to the wider public: the number of times they had been harassed online. Behind these figures lay stories of threats, bullying, sexualised abuse, reputation attacks and doxxing attempts — forms of digital violence whose cumulative psychological impact is often dismissed or minimised.
Online harassment is increasingly treated as background noise, something women are expected to tolerate as the price of participation. Yet evidence suggests the problem is intensifying. A recent article by UN Women, drawing on an unpublished study, noted a rise in online harassment targeting women following the July 2024 civil unrest. According to the study, 66 per cent of women surveyed reported receiving threatening or explicit messages on social media. The pattern is clear: digital spaces have become arenas for moral policing and punishment, particularly against women perceived to be too visible, too vocal or too successful.
It was against this backdrop that, during the UN’s 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence in November 2024, Radio Shadhin, Asiatic MCL and Mongol Deep Foundation launched the #MyNumberMyStory campaign. We asked women a deliberately specific question — not whether they had been harassed online, because that answer was already known — but how many times. What was their number?
We asked them to write it on their faces or bodies, photograph it and share it publicly.
The response was immediate. More than 70 influencers and public figures participated within days. Soon, over 500 Bangladeshi women from all walks of life joined them. The numbers ranged from single digits to hundreds to thousands. Each figure carried the weight of repeated violation and accumulated trauma.
Alongside the visual campaign, we produced a six-episode podcast series in which women spoke not only about their numbers but about the contexts behind them. The series reached nearly half a million listeners. Radio broadcasts covered a population of 70 million, while digital platforms achieved an eight-million reach with three million views. In total, the earned media impact exceeded 11 million impressions. For perhaps the first time, the scale of digital violence against Bangladeshi women became difficult to dismiss as anecdotal or exaggerated.
When awareness triggers attack
THEN came what we had anticipated, but still found sobering. The campaign posts themselves began attracting fresh waves of harassment. Women who had spoken publicly about being abused were abused again, in real time, for doing so.
By conventional behaviour-change metrics, this might be labelled a failure. A campaign against digital harassment had seemingly provoked more of it. But this interpretation misses the point entirely. The backlash did not undermine the campaign; it confirmed its central claim. It demonstrated, with brutal clarity, that women are punished not only for existing online, but also for naming the violence directed at them.
The harassment participants faced was not evidence of failure. It was documentation. It showed that women cannot even speak about harassment without being harassed for it. That is not a flaw in the campaign, it is the problem the campaign set out to expose.
Digital harassment does not disappear when comments are hidden or accounts are locked. It thrives in silence, normalisation and institutional indifference. Addressing it requires sustained attention, victim-centred policy responses and legal frameworks that prioritise protection over dismissal.
What we learned
FROM the outset, we knew the campaign carried risks. That is why legal and mental health support resources were integrated from day one, not added reactively when things escalated. Even so, the campaign reinforced how essential such support structures are, and how scarce they remain.
Several lessons stand out.
First, disruption matters. In a crowded digital landscape, issues that are not visually or conceptually arresting are easily ignored. Writing numbers on faces forced attention and refused erasure.
Second, backlash is not incidental; it is diagnostic. Resistance signals that power has been challenged. Preparedness for that backlash is not optional, it is fundamental.
Third, ethical storytelling requires responsibility towards those who speak. Amplifying voices without offering support simply transfers the burden of exposure onto the most vulnerable.
Cannot be episodic
YEARS ago, I shared a photograph celebrating a cricket victory and was attacked for it. Last year, hundreds of women shared their experiences of online abuse and were attacked for that too. The continuity is unmistakable.
The digital world now occupies a substantial portion of our daily lives, yet it remains deeply unsafe for women and girls. Treating this reality as an unfortunate by-product of technology is no longer credible. What is needed is not one-off campaigns, but sustained action — stronger enforcement of existing laws, clearer accountability from platforms, and institutional recognition of digital violence as real harm.
When Bangladeshi women speak — about politics, work, injustice or even cricket victories — we are still punished for it. Ending that punishment requires more than sympathy when abuse erupts. It requires solidarity, structural change and the refusal to accept misogyny as the cost of being heard. Until then, silence will remain the safest option and that is precisely the outcome harassment is designed to produce.
Sriya Sharbojoya is managing director of Radio Shadhin, deputy managing director of Asiatic 3Sixty and executive director of Mongol Deep Foundation.
