Bangladesh is one of the first few countries to have singed the Stockholm Declaration of August 1996. In the light of that declaration and the agenda for action a National Plan of Action has prepared as a follow-up to the Stockholm Declaration.

Child sexual abuse affects all strata of Bangladeshi society. Children are vulnerable from a very young age, with the risks for boys diminishing in their mid-teens as their physical strength increases. Overall, girls are much more at risk and children with disabilities are particularly vulnerable, as they are perceived to be easy to be victims. Abusers come from a wide range of social and occupational groups, but the majority are known to the victim: it is the pre-existing relationship that gives the abusers easy access to the child without raising the suspicions of guardians. Similarly with child sexual abuse; the silence on this issue has now been broken but information is still trickling out very slowly.

Reliable quantitative data on the extent of sexual abuse, sexual exploitation in Bangladesh is not available. Among all the abuses a child has to experience in a traditional society like Bangladesh, sexual abuse is the most difficult and complex. Not only is the experience harrowing in itself but the agony for the child doesn’t end with the act of abuse. The forces that govern society pushes the child and often the victimized family into a silent corner, forcing them to not only deny themselves or the child, the right to access legal or social justice but often carry for ever the stigma of a victim who must bear the burden of guilt and not the victimizer. In many ways, a sexually abused child is abuse twice, by the perpetrator physically, and second by society, both psychologically and socially. The matter becomes even more traumatic because the child and his family have to observe forced “silence” on the matter.

In 1998, Breaking the Silence recruited a social counselor to run a counseling bureau at Radda MCH-FP Center in Mirpur, Dhaka. This was done through a tri- partite agreement between the Breaking the Silence, the Management Board of the Center and Save the Children, Sweden. The immediate objectives of the project were to raise awareness in the Mirpur area against child sexual abuse, to provide counseling to affected children and educate the clients and the children attending the center about Child’ Rights. At the center the Social Counselor would gather a group of twenty to twenty five women and then discussed on Child Sexual Abuse. Over a three-year period, the social counselor collected a total of 117 cases. These 117 events were committed against children in different areas, different times and in different families. They were often presented as occurring in a neighbor’s family although at times the actual incident may well have been in their own family. The cases of sexual abuse were collected during four calendar years. The increase in numbers is likely to be due to more people participating were wiling to share. The types of abuse described showed the following pattern.