We Need To Let Girls Be Children

I will never forget the year I turned 12, because it suddenly felt like the whole world started looking at me differently. I had gotten my period just for a couple of months then, so I was still trying to cope with the horrors of the awful monthly visitor when the world started teaching me how I should dress more appropriately now.

I still painfully remember this one evening when my mother wasn’t home, and I went out with my aunt. I had a T-shirt on, and when she saw me, I felt her scan my entire body before giving me “advice”, which was that I was now growing up, and I should always wear a scarf around my chest. She also asked, “Did your mother not teach this to you yet?”

I immediately felt extremely uncomfortable and wanted to hide my body away. Since I didn’t have a scarf at that time, I started slouching, hoping it would somehow make my breasts disappear. I kept slouching like that until I turned 22, because I adapted to it without even realising it, and had to physically train myself out of it.

Girlhood has taught me that I wasn’t alone in this experience. On one fine evening, all of us had our childhood snatched away from us because the world didn’t think we looked like children anymore. Suddenly, we were expected to “dress modestly” without even understanding what it means, stop playing with the boys outside, and be invisible.

Puberty on its own is a very confusing period for a girl child, so adults are supposed to show more empathy and care for them. Instead, adults hand them a list of absurd rules that the girl child must now follow, with little to no explanation for it. And failure to abide by these rules often results in them getting scolded, or worse, shamed.

When I was in 7th grade, I had a teacher come up to me and my friends and tell us that if she had a daughter like us, she’d peel the skin off her back. What did we do to deserve a threat of this level? We were apparently being “too friendly” with a young male teacher that had recently joined the school. I wonder: when she said that to us, did she genuinely believe that a group of 13-year-old girls was trying to seduce an older man? Did she genuinely believe that we were able to comprehend what seduction even means?

Because now that I am in my 20s, I cannot imagine saying that to a 13-year-old. If I saw a group of young girls being friendly with an older man, all my attention and focus would be on how that man is behaving. All I would feel is protection and care for those children. Shouldn’t every adult feel that way?

Statistics clearly say that they don’t. On October 11, the world celebrated International Day of the Girl Child, and the theme this year was to end child marriage. The 2025 Bangladesh Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey revealed that 47.2% of women aged 20-24 years were married before they turned 18. Additionally, 22.3% gave birth before they turned 18 as well. Girls under 18 are not physically, emotionally, or psychologically ready for marriage, let alone motherhood. And while Bangladesh’s laws recognise that, recent statistics on child marriage and the general public’s perception of girls show how we as a nation clearly lack this understanding.

A culture that blames girls

Jannatul Tajmin’s case reminds us again how our nation perceives girls who fall victim to grooming, violence, and rape. A 15-year-old girl reportedly left home after an argument, and later travelled to Cox's Bazar to meet Raju, a 20-year-old man whom she had met through social media. While travelling back to her house alone, she fell victim to CNG driver Sumon Mia, who promised to take her home through a shorter route, but instead took her to an isolated paddy field, then raped and murdered her.

As news of this case spread across social media, an overwhelming wave of netizens began assassinating Tajmin’s character, shaming her for daring to travel by herself, and not knowing how to protect herself. It didn’t matter that a CNG driver raped and murdered a girl the first chance he got. It didn’t matter that an adult man groomed a minor into getting in a relationship with him, then encouraged her to travel alone. When a nation only focuses on shaming a girl for not behaving like an adult, but forgets to shame an adult for exploiting and grooming a child, it gives perpetrators the perfect social setting to shamelessly continue their crimes.

This is why laws alone will never be enough to prevent violence and crimes against girls. The Rajus of this nation happily go around grooming children and committing statutory rape because they know that our society will shame the girl for getting groomed. The Sumon Mias of our nation have the audacity to attempt such crimes despite knowing it is a crime because society gives them the strength to think that they might just get away with it. And they do.

So many incidents of rape, sexual assault, and violence against girls go unreported because of societal pressures, intimidation by perpetrators, or lack of legal and financial support. Moreover, many children are subjected to sexual assault in their very own homes, and in many of these cases, the children’s own families hide the crime to protect the perpetrators. A report by Shishurai Shob, a child-rights organisation, revealed that between January and June 2026, 42.86% of cases of child sexual assault took place in the children’s own homes.

There is something so rotten and disturbing about the way our society perceives girls. When a close relative shames a 12-year-old for not “covering up” while simultaneously allowing her husband to abuse her, when a school teacher threatens to assault 13-year–old girls instead of making sure they are protected from creepy adults, and when an entire nation is more focused on why a girl dared to venture out alone instead of asking why our streets aren’t safe, it silently creates a safety net for the ones who actually commit the crimes.