Fragmented reports reveal patterns of sexual violence in Bangladesh
Making Fragmented Reports Legible: Finding Patterns and Perceptions of Sexual Violence in Bangladesh
Human-Computer InteractionComputers and Society
Summary
Data about sexual violence in Bangladesh is scattered and incomplete. The authors analyzed over 2,800 news articles from the past decade to find patterns in who is affected, where incidents happen, and how the legal system responds. They also surveyed people’s views on what allows such violence to continue, highlighting weak enforcement and social issues. Their work helps organize and interpret messy data without claiming to estimate how often violence occurs or why.
What this means in practice
- •For humanitarian data teams: Create clearer and privacy-respecting databases from fragmented news reports on sensitive topics by combining spatial and thematic analyses.
- •For criminal justice analysts: Use structured media data to identify patterns in victim and incident characteristics where official data is limited or absent.
Authors
Sheherjan Haq, Sharifa Sultana
Abstract
Evidence about sexual violence in Bangladesh is fragmented across individual reports, while official and civil-society statistics rarely provide reusable case-level detail. We examine how structured analysis can make one part of this fragmented record legible without treating it as prevalence data. Our corpus contains 2,811 articles timestamped 2013-2023 from the Prothom Alo publishing ecosystem; 2,794 include parseable metadata about reported victims, alleged perpetrators, incidents, legal responses, and locations. We combine descriptive and spatial analysis of these records with thematic analysis of 115 convenience-sample survey responses collected in late 2020. The corpus documents many young, female, and student victims, frequent acquaintance and neighbor relationships, uneven geographic documentation, and substantial missingness in legal outcomes. Respondents most often describe weak enforcement, insecurity, patriarchal socialization, education gaps, and community inaction as conditions enabling persistence. These findings characterize news documentation and public perceptions; they do not estimate incidence, geographic risk, or causality. We contribute an uncertainty-aware framing for HCI research using sensitive, low-resource news data and identify design requirements for provenance, privacy, validation, and responsible communication.