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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the cultural meaning of Bangladeshi women’s experiences of sexual harassment, highlighting how women's class, age, and religion intersect with their gender identity to shape their unique sexual harassment narratives and inform effective sexual harassment prevention strategies.

Paper long abstract:

Sexual harassment (SH) on public buses in Dhaka remains a significant security concern for the city’s female inhabitants, with statistics revealing that 94% of women commuters experience such harassment (BRAC, 2018). These incidents often turn into violent rapes and gang rapes on public buses. However, the socio-cultural and patriarchal context in Bangladesh tends to trivialize this issue. The colloquial euphemism ‘Eve Teasing’ is used to refer to SH both in academic sources and mainstream media. Neither the legal system nor the police take SH allegations seriously. Studies on gender and public transport in Bangladesh not only provide limited attention to SH on public buses but illustrate the problem of sexual harassment by showing statistics of harassment while failing to analyze the qualitative narratives of women commuters. Therefore, this paper addresses this knowledge gap and documents how women’s class, age and religion interconnect with one another to create women’s understanding of sexual harassment in the specific socio-cultural context in Bangladesh. Using the data from 18 life-story interviews with women in Dhaka, this paper explains how through understanding and repetitive performances of respectable feminine values, norms, and behaviours, Bangladeshi women create a specific cultural interpretation of the causes, perpetration, and victimization of sexual harassment in Bangladesh. I explored that Women’s class status, religious affiliation and age intersect not only to influence the extent to which women accept, challenge, and negotiate with respectability but to determine how they explain SH, apportion blame for it and protest during SH incidents