30 years of Yasmin tragedy
Three decades after Yasmin’s murder, the crisis against which Dinajpur rose up has not disappeared; rather, in some respects, it has returned with an even more frightening face. A particular piece of information from the Bangladesh Mahila Parishad’s “Violence Against Women and Girls: 2025 Survey” is especially heart-wrenching: according to the survey, girls aged six to nine are at the highest risk among child victims of rape. At an age when a child should be holding a doll in her arms, she is instead becoming a victim of brutality. There can be no deeper social shame than this. According to the organisation’s latest figures, in just the first five months of 2026 (January to May), 1,035 women and girls were victims of violence, including 250 rape victims, 65 victims of gang rape, and 18 who were raped and then killed. And these figures represent only incidents reported in newspapers; it is easy to assume that the actual number of unreported and suppressed cases is many times higher.
