Rise Together: Ending Gender-Based Violence

The project was conceived as a response to a specific, documented failure of Bangladesh’s legal framework to protect the people most exposed to gender-based violence. In its application to FON, the Showhardo Alliance laid out that failure precisely. The definition of rape in Section 375 of the Penal Code, 1860 recognises only an act committed by a man against a woman, and contains an exception clause that leaves child brides above the age of thirteen without protection from marital rape. The punishments prescribed are inconsistent — life imprisonment or up to ten years for rape in general, but merely two years where the survivor is a child bride — inconsistencies that, in the alliance’s words, undermine the severity of the crime and obstruct justice. Gender-diverse people have no legal protection at all against gender-based or domestic violence. Indigenous women and sex workers endure violence with no specific legal provisions protecting them, and prosecutions for violence against sex workers are neither specific nor swift. The Women and Children Repression Prevention Act, 2000 leaves gaps in compensation and redress for rape survivors.

Behind these legal gaps stands a social reality: the communities affected are precisely those considered taboo in Bangladesh’s social context, which restricts their access not only to justice but to funding, allies, and public sympathy. As the alliance’s own expression of interest noted, international donors are reluctant to fund small organisations and informal alliances — so the communities facing the most acute violence are served by the organisations least able to secure resources.

Rise Together was designed to break that cycle: to build the knowledge and capacity of these communities and their organisations, generate their own evidence, and carry their recommendations into policy spaces from which they have historically been excluded.

The design logic connected six components in a deliberate sequence. Staff capacity building would strengthen the institutions; community trainings would build knowledge and self-protection skills among constituencies; local advocacy dialogues in Rangpur and Sylhet would surface community evidence before local authorities; media sensitisation would shape how that evidence travels publicly; research would formalise the evidence base; and a national advocacy dialogue would carry everything to national decision-makers. Awareness campaigns around international observance days would keep the issues publicly visible throughout.

The intended beneficiaries were gender-diverse people, Indigenous communities, female sex workers, girls and youth. The intended interlocutors ranged from local government officials, religious leaders and law enforcement to Members of Parliament, Supreme Court lawyers and human rights commissioners.

The project ran through one of the most volatile periods in Bangladesh’s recent history. Political transition brought a marked rise in hostility toward the project’s constituencies — university students facing consequences over perceived identity, heightened tensions between Indigenous and Bengali communities, and a general climate in which public association with these issues carried real risk. Two operational challenges dominated: community members’ fear of attending events, and persistent anxiety among participants about being confronted for taking part.

The alliance’s response was disciplined rather than dramatic. Member organisations intensified one-to-one and small-group engagement to rebuild confidence; venues were selected for security; all event information — locations, photographs, participant lists — was kept strictly confidential; staff monitored that no participant inadvertently disclosed event locations online; and public visibility was limited to activities that posed no risk. The result — every one of the 27 activities completed without a single security incident — is not a footnote. In this operating environment, it is an achievement in its own right, and evidence of an operational maturity that the alliance did not possess at the project’s start.