Abstract

Female targeted abuse in Bangladesh stems from a set of complex and multifaceted issues, including but not limited to religious misrepresentation, cultural dimensions, lack of government and social support, patriarchal roots, economic vulnerability, and physical vulnerability. These diverse yet analogous factors can be likened to different squares on a Rubik's cube, each representing a unique challenge that must be addressed simultaneously to solve the larger puzzle of gender-based violence. Image Based Sexual Abuse (IBSA) is the latest facet of female targeted abuse in Bangladesh. Due to the culturally and religiously conservative nature of the country, IBSA extends more widely than intimate images. By this same logic, threats of exposure are much more damaging to victims and victim allies, which can result in the justice system as a whole failing. Even in instances where victims do look for legal recourse, legislative lacking’s, alongside cultural and systematic issues act as a further deterrent. This paper is the first Bangladeshi Study on IBSA, and focuses on legislative and procedural inefficiency, socio-cultural factors, and lack of public awareness. The study applies Routine Activity Theory to showcase how legislative inefficiencies in Bangladesh allow motivated offenders to exploit vulnerable targets in the absence of a capable guardian. The authors posit that in this context, the state, through its failed legislative protections, non-responsive law enforcement, and weak executive institutions, is itself the ‘incapable guardian’. This study therefore seeks to redefine the ‘victim centric’ blame of IBSA and to establish IBSA as a crime of opportunity that exists not because of some sort of unique evil, or lack of modesty, but instead due to the inherent manner in which digital life now routinely puts women in the path of unregulated exposure, weak legal guardianship, and unchecked voyeurism, therefore allowing one to map the structural conditions, not just the malafide intent, that produces this harm

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