Safety We Are Failing to Ensure for Our Children

There was a time when children played in open fields until the light gave out, wandered to a neighbour's house unannounced, and walked to school without a parent tracking every step. That world is disappearing. A girl found dead in a sack near the pond outside her own home. A boy killed a few streets from home for the phone in his hand. A child was abused inside the very madrasa meant to shelter him. We are not imagining this shift. Close to sixteen thousand children were reported missing across Bangladesh in the first seven months of this year alone, more than seventy-five a day.

Most were eventually found. Roughly two thousand were not. I do not think this is really a story about children, not only. It is a story about what happens to the most exposed people in a society when law and order quietly falls apart. Women and children are not a separate crisis. They are simply the first to suffer when institutions stop doing their job, because they have the least power to protect themselves. I see this fear up close, in ways numbers alone cannot capture. I teach young adults, and I hear, more often than I used to, how their own childhoods have shrunk compared to what came before. Parents I know no longer let their children walk to school alone and no longer allow the unannounced visit to a friend's house that used to be an ordinary part of growing up here. A student once told me her mother tracks her location every time she leaves the house, not out of habit, but because she is genuinely afraid. That fear has become normal enough that no one questions it anymore, and that, more than any single case, tells me something has quietly broken.

A few days ago, we heard someone in a position of responsibility respond to a child's death by asking why the parents were not more careful, as though vigilance at home is a substitute for a functioning state outside it. That question misses the point entirely. A family cannot lock a child indoors forever and call it a childhood. Safety was never supposed to be something each household had to manufacture alone. What makes this harder to accept is something many of us suspect, even if we cannot always prove it case by case: that the people meant to be responsible for this, the officials, the lawmakers, and the senior police, do not seem to live inside the same collapse they are meant to be managing. Their own children, many assume, study abroad or move through the country inside a bubble of security and connections an ordinary family will never have. It does not really matter whether this comes from indifference or from simply not being capable. Either way, if the suspicion holds even partly true, the people responsible for this are not the ones paying for it, and their families remain untouched by exactly the danger they are failing to protect others from. It is not that the state has no capacity at all.

In May this year, an eight-year-old girl named Ramisa Aktar was raped and murdered in Mirpur. Within three weeks, the accused was tried and sentenced to death. A Supreme Court advocate, writing about the case afterward, noted that the tribunal handling it had more than eighteen hundred other cases still waiting, some for years, and drew the obvious conclusion: the system can move fast when it wants to. Which means the failure in every other case is not a lack of capacity. It is a lack of will, applied unevenly, mostly withheld. So the question is not whether we can catch one or two criminals and call the matter closed. The question is what happens to the thousands of cases that never draw that kind of attention, that simply join a queue and disappear into it, while the people meant to prevent them from happening in the first place remain untouched by the consequences of their own failure. If we count the rising number of robberies, murders, and extortion cases, alongside the passivity of the agencies meant to stop them, the picture is unmistakably alarming. If those responsible for law and order cannot do this job, they should be honest enough to say so, and the country should find people who can. It is not shameful to admit a job is beyond you. What is shameful is holding onto that post anyway, while children keep disappearing and getting abused under your watch. Real seriousness would look like something we could actually see: an open account of how many missing-child cases remain unresolved and for how long, a commitment that a case does not quietly close the moment public attention moves elsewhere. Someone competent needs to take this seriously, and soon, not just when a case happens to make headlines. Because if this is allowed to continue, we may reach a point where there is very little left worth protecting. 
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The writer is Associate Professor, Department of English and Modern Languages, International University of Business Agriculture and Technology (IUBAT). He can be reached at [email protected]