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From the back seat of a car, with the windows up and a driver at the wheel, Dhaka can look like a perfectly manageable city. From the shabby local bus beside it, the view is different. The woman who squeezes onto a morning bus will shrug, as if you had asked whether it rains in the monsoon. Ask two women about safety here, and you may hear two honest answers that do not match. Both are describing the city they know. The trouble begins when one experience is mistaken for the whole.
For many women, harassment is not an event but a condition of moving through Dhaka. An Action Aid Bangladesh study in 2016 found that 84 per cent of women commuters had faced verbal or physical sexual harassment, and 62 per cent said they limit their movement and keep strict timings when alone. A 2022 survey by UNDP and National Human Rights Commission, covering 5,187 women, found that 57 per cent named public transport as the most dangerous place they encounter. Behind these numbers are quiet skills: choosing the seat near the exit, holding a bag like a shield, pretending to take a call, leaving early, or not going at all.
Now consider another life. A woman lives in a gated community with guards at the gate. Her car takes her to an office, a mall, a club, or another compound. Dhaka, for her, is a series of protected interiors joined by a view through tinted glass. She has rarely waited at a roadside at dusk or stood pressed in a crowd. This is not a moral failing. It is simply her life, and nothing in it has contradicted her sense that the city is safe.
Why does the gap exist? Perception is built from exposure, not from reports. Henri Lefebvre reminded us that space is not only what is built but also what is lived, and people live the same city very differently. Safety is not spread evenly across Dhaka. It follows income, mobility, gender and the hour of the day. BRAC’s study drew on women from low- and lower-middle-income backgrounds who commute by public transport and on foot, and 94 per cent of those using public transport reported sexual harassment.
Harassment is also invisible to those who are not its target. A touch on a bus, a comment from a passing rickshaw, and a man who follows for three streets: each is over in moments, and women have learned that reporting brings shame, disbelief or more trouble. In UNDP and NHRC findings, only about 1 per cent of the women who faced harassment went to law enforcers. When nothing is seen or recorded, it is easy to assume nothing happened.
And much of what feels like a safe city is actually a safe purchase. The guard, the wall, the camera, and the car are not features of Dhaka. They are services bought by a household.
This matters because perception shapes credibility. When comfortable and influential people say, “I have never seen this,” the accounts of women who face it daily can start to sound like exaggeration. It is the same instinct behind the familiar questions after an incident: why was she out so late? What was she wearing? These questions quietly move the burden from the harasser to the woman.
It also shapes what gets built. Those who plan, fund and decide about cities often move through them door to door, protected at both ends. Footpaths, street lighting, safe bus stops and women-friendly transport are rarely urgent to someone who never depends on them. Investment flows towards enclaves, which only move safety indoors for those who can afford it. And as more people retreat into private security, they stop demanding the public realm, so safety becomes a private good rather than a civic right, and those left outside the gate have the least power to ask for it.
None of this is an accusation. Most of us who write, teach and decide about cities carry some of this protection, and a privilege that works well is hard to notice. So how should we measure a city? By the journey of the most exposed, not the best protected. A city is safe for women only when a woman can wait alone at a bus stop at eight in the evening, in ordinary clothes, without calculating anything. By that test, we still have far to go.
A beginning is simple. Listen to women who use the public city, and believe them. Take the bus at least once, and notice. Then ask whether the Dhaka we describe is the one seen from the car window, or the one lived on the street.
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The writer is a faculty member, Department of Architecture, Bangladesh University