“These rapes are done so you and I cannot go out,” the gender educator, who has worked across South Asia and regularly in Bangladesh since 1976, told women at her ‘first official talk’ in Dhaka.
The talk and question-and-answer session with Bhasin that followed was organised by One Billion Rising, a global movement to end violence against women, at the Biswa Sahitya Kendra on Saturday.
Bhasin, an Indian national, is best known for her work on the NGO Sangat, a South Asian network of feminists. She is also the South Asia coordinator of One Billion Rising.
No-one is born a rapist, Bhasin said. “But our society has become efficient at creating them.”
“Under patriarchy, men must have power, women must not.”
The patriarchal system considers women to be ‘zero’.
The ‘amazing privileges’ given to boys and men by this system and their sense of power over women lead to their dehumanisation, she said.
Bhasin pointed to the comments by Apan Jewellers owner Dildar Ahmed in defence of his son and Banani rape suspect Shafat Ahmed, as an example of the toxic mindset created by these patriarchal ideas.
“The father of the Raintree rapist said his son had done nothing wrong and that he had done similar things himself,” she said.
“I think men are missing out when they do not raise their children. Can someone who raises a child rape one?” she asked.
Bhasin also considers the ‘dangerous’ interaction between the omnipresence of sexualised women’s bodies in pornography, advertising and the media and patriarchy’s control of women’s sexuality as another factor.
The result of this interaction is a mentality where men want ‘their women’ to be ‘covered’ and ‘other women’ to be ‘uncovered’, she said.
The activist praised the bravery of the two victims of the Banani rape case for coming forward to accuse their rapists and also lauded those who had supported them in doing so.
“It’s always when it’s a middle-class woman,” she said.
Society must consider why it was this incident that sparked such outrage and not the father and the daughter who committed suicide after her rape or the Mymensingh policewoman who set herself on fire after being raped by a policeman, she said.
In 2015 a total of 21,220 Woman & Child Repression cases were reported to Bangladesh police. As of May 20, the number of Woman & Child Repression cases reported in April 2017 stood at 1,386.
Asked what could be done to protest sexual violence and respond to the negative comments about the conduct of the rape victims, their decision to attend the party and their dress, Bhasin suggested a movement of women going out to assert their place in the public sphere.
“More women have to go out on the roads and to hotels,” she said. “We must say ‘I will go out’.”
Society must also shun those people like Dildar Ahmed who defend and protect rapists, and his store must be boycotted, she said.
The activist also joined many in the women’s right’s community in condemning Bangladesh’s provision of ‘special circumstances’ in the child marriage law, saying it showed how women could also provide support to the patriarchy.
“Women can lower the age of marriage. They can change the law so that a victim can marry a rapist. Can you imagine this law in your country?”
She also had harsh words for women who attained positions of power in the patriarchal system by taking on the negative qualities of masculinity.
“I think it would be tragic to become like men,” she said. “Look at [PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi]. How can the head of Pepsi be empowered when she is making half of Americans obese? I do not call such women ‘empowered’. I call them butchers.”