‘We assumed the DV Act would be an easy win’: Sara Hossain on the DV Act in Bangladesh, and its parallel history with the PWDVA

Asmita: The idea of speaking with you is that the histories of the Domestic Violence Acts in Bangladesh and India are somewhat intertwined, since they developed around the same time. Could you speak to the history of law-making in Bangladesh on domestic violence?

Sara: Sure. I think there were two impetuses to the development of the law on domestic violence.  

First, there was already an understanding in the women’s movement and among legal  aid groups that domestic violence was a real issue, but we were providing  responses based on existing laws, which did not expressly recognise domestic violence, and which had many gaps. Every lawyer who represented a woman or child facing domestic violence understood that protection was needed, but it wasn’t clear how to get a legal remedy.

The second impetus to drafting the law was international, the model law from the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, which was circulated globally and worked on by UN Women (or ‘UNIFEM,’ as it was then) for domestication in different countries. Through that process, more women’s groups became aware of the issue. In Bangladesh, at least two organisations began drafting a law to address domestic violence, drawing on the international material but also, importantly, on India's legislation which was already in place. The Law Commission in Bangladesh also drafted legislation, again looking partly at India’s.

So the international process, once it was grounded in our region through the Indian legislation, became a real catalyst for others to think about what was possible in our own context. We were not working on a blank slate and women’s groups already knew we needed a more focused response on DV, and one which prioritised victim/ survivor  protection.

Asmita: I wanted to understand where the movement in Bangladesh stood on domestic violence at that point. You already had different organisations approaching it in different ways. How did you bring them to the table to participate in drafting the law?

Sara: People were working from their own platforms initially. The main legal aid groups, all NGOs,  included the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust, Bangladesh National Women Lawyers’ Association (BNWLA), BRAC’s Human Rights and Legal Services Programme (‘HRLS’), Ain O Salish Kendra (‘ASK’), and also the  National Legal Aid and Services Organisation (‘NLASO’) (now known as the Directorate of Bangladesh Legal Aid);  the last  wasn’t very active on this issue at that time, though it must have had many relevant clients. Then there were women’s groups like the Bangladesh Mahila Parishad and Naripokkho, who had focused on campaigns against violence against women from the mid-1980s onward, again, in response to emblematic cases such as the Yasmin or Rima killings, and following international attention on addressing violence against women, and legal changes in the region, including India.

In Bangladesh, violence-against-women reforms came through special legislation, the Suppression of Violence against Women and Children Act 2000, dealing with acid attacks, abduction, rape and trafficking initially, rather than through changes being incorporated into the Penal Code or Criminal Procedure Code. 

In fact that’s been a consistent pattern in Bangladesh and any new serious crime, whether violence against women, trafficking, or terrorism, has been carved into separate legislation, with ‘special provisions’ e.g. for fast-tracking investigations and trials, denial of bail, victim protection measures, and so on. But domestic violence didn’t feature in that stand alone violence-against-women legislation, except as dowry-related violence. If there was no dowry demand involved with the ensuing violence, you couldn’t access those protections under the special law.  

Most law reform agendas for the women’s movement prior to the DV Act were about personal law reform and certain extreme forms of violence against women, such as rape and acid attacks, not domestic violence. The contrast between how the movement, and how rights organisations worked on rape versus acid attacks is instructive and maybe holds some lessons for how to frame our responses more effectively on DV. Acid violence emerged as an issue in Bangladesh before it did in India, and the response, which included separate stand-alone legislation on acid attacks, plus legislation restricting the sale and availability of acid, was led by the Acid Survivors Foundation. They built a holistic response through data collection, coordination between the government and NGOs on victim support, and, most critically, survivor engagement, so that acid survivors, almost all young women and girl, themselves became the ones speaking about their pain and their need for justice, and their visibility and courage created a real impact on the public, and on justice actors. Much of the work with survivors was catalysed by Nasreen Huq of Naripokkho. That work, and Bangladesh being first on this, seems to have informed India’s later acid legislation. Because the numbers were smaller and more discrete, and the impact of the crime so visible,  groups could organise around the issue of acid violence effectively, and incidents of acid attacks have fallen as a result.

The initiative to draft the DV Act came with a recognition that we needed to build a victim-centred response, addressing what a woman or child actually needs, and that this is different from a punitive process.

Two groups were working on drafts of their own: BNWLA, and ASK. Eventually, and after quite a lot of back and forth, everyone came together in one coalition, the Citizens’ Initiative on Domestic Violence (CIDV), which let us pool our experience  and expertise. BNWLA, BLAST and others, had a huge client base of women who were survivors of violence , so through our reflections on our work and drawing on clients’ experiences, we could contribute to the drafting far more effectively.

We also took an early and important decision to abandon our separate drafts and instead build on the Law Commission’s draft, since it was already engaged on the issue and the Law Ministry was more likely to build upon this than purely NGO-prepared drafts. We combined the three drafts, taking useful elements from each, and once that was agreed, we went back to the comparative examples, looking at India’s legislation in much more detail to work out what we needed.

Asmita: Bangladesh, like India, has a personal law regime. Do you also have a secular option, like our Special Marriage Act?

Sara: Yes, we do have a civil law option for marriage, the Special Marriage Act, 1872, but very few people use this (given it still requires people to formally renounce their faith in the case of Hindus and Muslims), and of course laws like the Guardians and Wards Act, 1890 or the Child Marriage Restraint Act, 2017 which apply to all irrespective of faith or community. We have separate Family Courts regulated by the Family Courts Act, 2023 (an updating of the earlier law),   maintenance applications are made for Muslim and Hindu women under the FCA and based on personal law, and alimony for Christian women under the Divorce Act, 1869, before the Family Court, applying personal law principles. After divorce Muslim women of course can  only get maintenance for the limited ‘iddat’ period , which remains an issue.