Bangladeshi rural communities are often strongly patriarchal. Women in these communities, particularly those suffering from domestic violence, find it difficult to make crimes public.
If they go to a local leader or court, they are often seen as bringing shame on their family. If they do bring a case, the legal system can work against them. The traditional manner of resolving disputes, through a committee of respected elites (or, shalish), is often male-dominated and oppressive for women.
To tackle these challenges, the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) provided £17 million in funding over a five-year period to local organisations aiming to support community legal services (CLS).
These organisations would have two main objectives: raise legal awareness and provide support to people with disputes – either by helping to resolve the disputes directly, or by referring them to legal aid. Many of those who brought disputes were women. Many suffered from domestic violence.
With UK aid currently under considerable scrutiny, our new review of this project gives a nuanced picture of what aid can achieve.
The good news: DFID’s support to these organisations was commendable
For decades, scholars have critiqued aid projects for wasting significant resources trying to copy and transplant Western justice institutions, such as the formal courts. They have trained judges and built court houses, but didn’t take into account the wider political, social or economic circumstances that facilitated these institutions in the first place.
DFID and the CLS project took a different tack: they started by analysing the day-to-day legal problems faced by poor and marginalised groups in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh has a rich diversity of people, with numerous religions, ethnicities, languages and histories. People face quite different problems depending on who they are, and where they’re from.
For example, child marriage has recently hit the headlines – the government has pushed through a law allowing marriage of under 18s in ‘special circumstances’. However, the practice is far more prevalent in some areas than others. As such, funding local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with local networks and knowledge is crucial.
As a result of DFID’s spending, and its local focus, huge numbers of Bangladeshis became aware of the existing formal legal remedies, and the ways in which they could make claims. In one district of southern Bangladesh, an NGO claimed to have worked with up to 21,000 people as part of community outreach on legal issues.
Huge numbers of Bangladeshis became aware of the existing formal legal remedies, and their interactions with the justice system have often become fairer.
People’s interactions with the justice system have often become fairer. For example, in the traditional shalish, women were unable to attend their own hearings, and were treated with disrespect if they did go. In the NGO mediation supported by the project, women were often given equal time to speak, and therefore heard in public in ways previously unavailable to them.
The NGOs funded by the project, or community groups they helped form, often took it upon themselves to tackle serious problems. During our research, we heard how one community group managed to prevent a child marriage. After failing at first to convince the girl’s father, they succeeded through leveraging their local political relationships. The groom went on to enter a different arranged marriage – which ended quickly after persistent domestic violence. Hearing of this, the girl’s father thanked the members of community group for protecting his daughter.
It is in this – the day-to-day defences of people’s dignity – that gradual social change can emerge.
