1As research in India has shown, when young women marry men who do not meet with familial approval the state usually protects patriarchal kinship (PUDR 2003; Chowdhry 2004, 2007, 2013; Mody 2008; Basu 2011, 2015). Prem Chowdhry, for example, has documented how, whilst inter-caste marriage is legal in India, the courts generally uphold accusations of rape, kidnapping and abduction made against lower caste men by the families of their wives (2004, 2013). Constructed as morally deviant by the courts, the young women are returned to their families who either hastily marry them off, or, in some cases, murder them. Meanwhile the husbands are routinely sent to jail or sometimes murdered, particularly if they are from dalit groups (see PUDR 2003; for Pakistan, see Hussain and Afzal 2013). Here, legislation which ostensibly protects against gendered violence is routinely used to discipline young couples who flout caste and kinship norms (see also Basu 2015, 2011:99). In Perveez Mody’s analysis of “abduction politics” in Delhi, for example, transgressive inter-caste marriages are framed as abductions, or—in the case of Hindu women marrying Muslim men—“love Jihad,” neatly justifying the arrest of Muslim husbands whilst constructing compelling narratives of the victimhood of Hindu women (Mody 2008). As Mody notes, in these cases “protection” is a subterfuge for the disciplining of transgressive love, not to say the wider agenda of Hindutva politics (Mody 2022).

4Whilst, as in India, these cases show how the state actively upholds and reproduces patriarchal kinship norms, the terrain in which the incarceration of Dhaka “marriage victims” plays out is also inflected by the institutions, funding conditions and narratives of gender and development, for international aid is a major influence in Bangladesh (Hossain 2017). As I shall argue, caught between the binaries of empowerment and victimhood, the women demonstrate the wrong kind of agency for development narratives (choosing their own partners, rather than employment, for example) and, by moving outside of socially acceptable family life, have become displaced. This leads to them being “made-up” (a term I explain later) as victims, leading to their placement in the carceral conditions of the Safe House. In order to explain how this happens, in what follows I describe the institutional practices which ascribe victimhood to different types of cases in contemporary Dhaka—victims of domestic violence, in the first instance, and runaway or eloping girls in the second. Instead of taking victimhood as a neutral category, I analyze it as arising within specific historical, political and economic contexts. As I argue, victimhood in Dhaka is political, providing important entitlements and protections for some whilst simultaneously concealing what is really going on for others (Jeffery and Candea 2006). I begin by explaining how my research led me to the Safe House and its “marriage victims.” After theorizing victimhood and situating it in the context of my research—Bangladeshi NGOs working on issues of domestic abuse and other marriage troubles—I describe how victims are “made up” via bureaucratic processes which take place in specific sites. We then return to the Safe House. Via ethnographic material from a “workshop” facilitated by a Bangladeshi NGO, I argue that the victimhood label erases the real plight of the “marriage victims,” concealing their agency and the messiness and complexity of familial and intimate relationships.

Researching Victimhood in Dhaka

7Mapping these services, let alone gaining access to them, was beyond me, given the limitations of my fieldwork, which was interrupted by COVID-19, and the lack of centralized information. Some sites are strictly guarded. The location of shelters, for example, is kept secret, whilst during my visit to the Victim Support Centre located at the Police Thana Headquarters, I was not allowed to take pictures or indicate its location. Meanwhile my access to the government run Safe House, described below, was only possible with the support of the NGO. Whilst inside, my movements were controlled by the Safe House Director and the female guards. My account is thus fragmented, and impressionistic, a “glimpse-into” rather a more deeply located and lived ethnography. I was not able to verify the women’s stories, meet their families, check the legal details of their cases or find out what happened after my visit to the Safe House. Moreover, research that takes place in conditions of carcerality leads to heightened power imbalances and a tendency for interlocutors to present themselves and their stories in particular ways. Rather than seeking, journalistically, to uncover “the truth,” all we might hope for under such conditions is an appreciation of the conditions under which such narratives are constructed (Mehta 2018).

8These problems are accompanied by the ethical difficulties of research on victimhood, particularly when arguing that for some, the categorization leads to carcerality. The danger is that the analysis is used to delegitimate victimhood, thus furthering the interests of perpetrators (Convery 2006; Jeffery and Candea 2006). Yet to investigate victimhood as a political category is not to negate the suffering of the thousands of women who pass annually through the sites where I did my fieldwork, nor indeed to suggest that claims of victimhood are false (Fassin and Rechtman 2009:ix). Nor should it undermine the important work of Bangladeshi human rights NGOs, feminist activists, or legislation designed to improve the rights of women and children. As we shall see, for some women, being “made up” as a victim can confer important protections and entitlements. Rather, my objective is to reflect upon how patriarchal interests and the state work together, co-opting victimhood and reformulating it in order to assert harsh discipline on young women who transgress. I shall return to these points shortly. First, the Safe House.

9Situated on the edge of the city and reached by a journey involving multiple CNG taxis and buses, my initial visit to the government-run Safe House was with a paralegal employed by the NGO. As noted below, the Safe House inhabitants included lost or runaway girls, mentally ill or disabled girls, and the “marriage victims.” Like the Victim Support Centre, the Safe House was serviced by a range of NGOs who offered support and legal advice to those incarcerated there, though in the case of the NGO I was working with, not to the “marriage victims” since this was seen as giving support to under-age marriage, which the NGO had campaigned against. Described to me by the NGO as a state-run shelter for underage girls, the Safe House might be compared with the Darul Aman shelters for runaway women in Pakistan (Hossain and Afzal 2013) or Nari Niketan (Centre for the Rehabilitation of Women) in India (Chowdry 2004), though in the Dhaka Safe House only teenage girls are held, officially under the age of eighteen. The NGO deplored the conditions, particularly the lack of education and training, and endeavored to get lost girls transferred to orphanages where they might be taught skills. It is worth noting that whilst the Safe House offers protection against the violence of families and is a sanctuary for lost and abandoned girls until they turn eighteen, it is described in the Bangladesh media as “a juvenile detention facility” (Daily Star 2018). It is thus an ambiguous, liminal space for girls and women who are “out of place”: part protective facility provided by the guardian state, part jail.

11During the visit the young women were interviewed by the paralegal in a chilly antechamber on the ground floor. It was January, and all complained of freezing cold showers, as well as the poor quality of the food. Here are two examples, taken from my notes:

Shuli married her classmate Rahan (her eyes light up as she quietly speaks his name). She says she’s 19 but her parents claim she is 17 which is what it states on her “certificate.” They ran away to get married, had a “court marriage,” and were staying in a room in Dhaka, going to college. But her parents took out a case and the police caught them. She has been here for three months. The paralegal tells me that her parents bribed the police to have her held here.

Shaila’s certificate states that she’s 16 years and 7 months but she claims she is 19. She says that her parents reduced her age when she started school. She married in secret; the boy was her neighbor. She was living at home, and he was with his parents, but her parents found out. They beat her so she escaped to her in-laws’ house but her parents sent the police who arrested the in-laws and brought her here. This was a month ago. Now there’s a case against her parents-in-law. She wants to remain married and be with her husband.

12If we define victimhood in simple terms as “one who is reduced or destined to suffer under some oppressive or destructive agency” (Oxford English Dictionary, cited in Jeffery and Candea 2006:287) Shaila and Shuli fit the bill. Yet rather than being the victims I had imagined—girls forced into underage marriage—according to their accounts—and that of all the “marriage victims” I met—they were the victims of their parents and the police, who had used the 2017 Child Marriage Restraint Act to incarcerate them. To understand this further, let us examine victimhood in more detail.

The Making-up of Victims

13In their history of the medicalization of trauma over the twentieth century, Fassin and Rechtman show how its diagnosis and the institutionalization of PTSD has reformulated the ways in which suffering is understood and memory formulated. Since the Holocaust and Vietnam war, the authors argue, trauma has become increasingly central to how suffering is socially recognized and sympathy apportioned (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). As “the universal language of a new politics of the intolerable” (Fassin and Rechtman 2009:93), trauma has become a claim of victimhood, its diagnosis meriting financial compensation or other forms of recompense, including access to support services, asylum and counselling. Crucially, trauma choses its victims. Not everyone’s trauma is recognized, for it is as much a moral judgement as a clinical diagnosis (Fassin and Rechtman 2009:282–84).

14Ticktin’s analysis of the humanitarian measures put in place by the French state to relieve the suffering of some (but not all) migrants comes to similar conclusions. Here, “regimes of care” arise from a moral imperative to provide care and protection for suffering individuals as a solution to problems of global inequality and oppression (Ticktin 2011). “Suffering bodies” are provided with care by medicalized humanitarianism and the movement against gendered violence, but only if they are confirmed as morally legitimate (Ticktin 2011:4). Only migrants who are sick, or whose bodies have been violated by sexual violence qualify for care. Meanwhile, ever harsher restrictions are put in place to contain the rest, for the innocent victims whose maimed bodies require care are outnumbered by delinquents. These security measures “enable a form of armed love in which the moral imperative to act is accompanied, explicitly or implicitly, by practices of violence and containment” (Ticktin 2011:5). As I shall suggest later, a similar see-sawing between morally legitimate victim and delinquent in need of containment can be discerned in the treatment of “marriage victims” in Dhaka.

15As both Ticktin’s and Fassin and Rechtman’s work demonstrates, victimhood is profoundly political, arising out of specific histories, political economies and cultural contexts; as such it cannot be treated as a singular or neutral category (Jacoby 2015; Jeffery and Candea 2006; Hoondert, Mutsaers, and Arfman 2019). Rather than essentializing victimhood and treating it as everywhere the same, we need to investigate how it is “made-up” in each context, for example via medical diagnoses, legal claims, narrative tropes, documentation etc. By “making-up,” I am of course referencing Ian Hacking’s work (2013). For Hacking, the making-up of people is a process by which categories are introduced in order to enumerate and classify—multiple personality disorder, for example, perverts, or “the obese.” These categories in turn generate new subjectivities and ways of being. As Hacking puts it: “people spontaneously come to fit their categories” (Hacking 2013:161).

16Rather than focusing on subjectivities however, this paper is concerned with how the bureaucratic category of victim is made-up and formed. During this process particular features of the victim’s experiences and history are enhanced whilst others are concealed. Here, I draw inspiration from Mookherjee’s imagery of the “combing over” of scars in the treatment of Bangladeshi birangona (women who were raped by Pakistani forces during the 1971 Bangladeshi War of Independence). Representing the power to reveal some types of knowledge whilst concealing others, Mookherjee argues that the metaphor of the comb helps explain how birangona are simultaneously held up by the liberal left as national heroines whilst the long-term impacts of rape are occluded (Mookherjee 2015).

17In what follows, I focus on how particular women and children become classified as victims within the NGO where I did my fieldwork rather than making broader claims about victimhood per se. My purpose is to show the relationship between practices of “making up” and, in the case of the “marriage victims” the carcerality of the Safe House. As I shall argue, becoming officially classified as a “victim” does not result from an individual’s experience of violence and/or other forms of abuse alone, but via bureaucratic processes and the sites victims-in-the-making have passed through or services they have used. Crucially, shelters and Safe Houses offer protection for vulnerable women and girls who have become displaced from their families. In some cases, it is this displacement from socially acceptable kinship—being socially and physically out of place—which confers the victimhood, rather than explicitly revealed instances of violence or trauma.

18As explained earlier, an assemblage of services is available to women and children experiencing domestic and gendered violence in Dhaka (U.K. Home Office 2024). Some of the victims I met during my fieldwork had been referred to the NGOs via government run services, predominantly the Victim Support Centre at the local police station. The majority of the cases that the NGO deals with, however, involve clients attending drop-in sessions at their offices or clinics. Arriving alone or with family or friends, women seek advice on a wide array of marriage related troubles and misfortunes. Abandonment and demand dowry are widespread, as are their husbands’ infidelity, second marriages, drug addiction and fraudulent behavior (Gardner 2024b, 2022). Violence is a devastating common thread that links the cases. In the files we analyzed from the NGO Ayn O Shallish Kendra from 2016–19, 75% featured domestic violence. If a woman complains of violence she is advised to report it to the police and have it logged in the GD (General Diary) to provide documentary evidence. Sometimes the clients are family members seeking the “rescue” of a daughter who has eloped or is experiencing domestic violence in her marriage. These families also have to file a complaint with the police; without a record in the GD there is nothing the NGOs can do.

20Once the file has been opened, the husband is invited to the office to hear the complaint and, in most cases, mediation is offered. This often involves the wider family, for complaints routinely concern the behavior of in-laws towards wives and/or disputes concerning living arrangements. If there is significant violence and she is not able to return to her natal family, the client—now victim—might be offered a place in an NGO shelter. Before this happens, however, the victim must be assessed by a counsellor in order to ascertain her mental health. In one long-running case that I observed, Salina and her baby stayed in a shelter after repeated acts of violence performed by her husband. Without anyone in her extended family able to house her this was the only safe option. Although she eventually returned to her drug-addicted husband, the shelter allowed her a space to consider her options and negotiate with her husband in the many mediation sessions held by NGO lawyers (Gardner 2022).

21In cases such as Salina’s, being classified as a victim opens the possibility of claiming protection as part of a “regime of care” (Ticktin 2011) which, as we have seen, is officially supported by the state, funded by international donors and staffed by the police and NGOs. Categorized as a victim, Salina was able to live in safety with her baby in an NGO shelter and received advice and mediation from feminist lawyers and the NGO counsellor. Her experience of violence, documented as “torture” in her typed-up obhiyog, and her relocation to the NGO shelter make her victimhood easy to see. In other instances, however, the making-up of victims is more opaque. Rather than derived from documented violence and/or abuse, in some of the cases I observed, women were classified as victims primarily because they had been passed to the NGO via the Victim Support Unit (VSC).

22Situated on the site of the thana police station, the VSC was an outwardly impressive building which spoke legions about the mismatch between intentionality and action. Unlike other services, it was well resourced, featuring a play area, a canteen, examination rooms for medical staff and counsellors, and a dorm. Staffed by female police officers and a roster of NGO support workers it had been carefully designed to tend for the needs of the city’s many victims of gendered violence. During my visit the VSC was, however, empty, save for a small boy dressed in a fluffy hoodie. Appearing drugged, he dribbled and mumbled in answer to the attending lawyer’s questions. He was lost, she concluded, and unless his parents claimed him, his case would be put before the courts, and he would be taken to a children’s home. The lawyer told me she dreaded having to work at the VSC because there were never any victims. There used to be more, but for reasons no-one could explain, the surrounding police stations had stopped referring them so there was nothing to do. Looking through the day’s entries only one other victim had been processed: a teenage girl who had run away because her parents were forcing her to marry. She would be sent to the Safe House.

23In another case, a “victim” was brought to the NGO after having been picked up by the police. She had arrived via the VSC, where she had been declared “mentally incapacitated” by the on-duty doctor. Incoherent and confused, all that could be ascertained from everyone’s questions was that she worked for a garment factory, had gone on a picnic for a work outing, and got lost. Eventually the name of the factory was revealed, and people were called to take her away. Sanny had also been referred by the VSC, four months earlier. Since then, she had been living in the NGO shelter. Aged fourteen, the NGO staff told me that her father was a drug addict and her mother had remarried. She was supposed to be living with her grandparents but had run away multiple times. The NGO had tried to place her with a madrasa but she’d absconded from there too and now it looked likely that she would be sent to a Girls’ Home. A counselling session with her focused on her career ambitions. What did she enjoy doing? Might she be a doctor, or a teacher or an engineer? She listened attentively but didn’t reply. Later, staff confided in me that she was headstrong and “always wanted to be free.” When I asked why she was a “victim” one of the lawyers explained that it was because she had been referred by the VSC. But what was she a victim of? With a laugh the lawyer replied that she was “a victim of nothing.”

24In these cases, the victims are “made- up” by their location in the sites which comprise Dhaka’s “regime of care” (Ticktin 2011). Assessed by medical staff and counsellors and their stories documented as “cases,” within a carefully ordered bureaucracy, it is these processes which confer victimhood rather than officials’ knowledge of the trauma and abuse they may or may not have suffered, the details of which either remain concealed or are smoothed out in the legal language of the obhiyog. Indeed, I suggest that the primary reason that girls such as Sanny are categorized as “victims” is because they are people-out-of- place, picked up by the police and sent to the VSC. In a strongly patriarchal society in which girls and young women are expected to be under the protection of their families until they marry, runaways and lost girls must be settled into alternative protective institutions. The nomenclature of victimhood enables this to happen.

25Whilst the NGO shelter is a temporary solution, its resources are insufficient to allow for long term placements. Runaways and lost girls whose circumstances are more complex are likely to be sent to the Safe House. Here, we see how Ticktin’s “armed love” (Ticktin 2011) offers protection alongside harsh disciplining. Meanwhile girls who refuse to do as told and remain out-of-place slide discursively from “victim” to “delinquent.” Let us return there.

Unruly Love, Discipline and Punishment

26A few months after my first visit I travelled to the Safe House with NGO staff for a “workshop.” This involved a meal of take-away fried chicken and soft drinks followed by a long session in which each girl was required to stand and answer questions posed by the small group of NGO staff and the foreign anthropologist who were seated at the front, overseen by a handful of bored looking female police officers. Of the girls attending this “workshop,” nine were deaf, mute or “mentally disabled,” six were lost or runaways and ten were “marriage victims.” Whilst I was not able to collect verifiable or consistent data, my notes indicate that the lost, mentally ill and disabled girls were from low income families, often residing in Dhaka’s bastees and often illiterate (Gardner 2024a). Meanwhile the “marriage victims” were predominantly from middle class families, many of whom had studied up to class ten or more when they met their husbands. The stories of the lost girls were deeply troubling. They had either run away or got lost in the city and did not know the names of the bastees where they lived or how to find their family. In one case, a fourteen-year-old girl had travelled alone to Dhaka to meet a boy who she had met in a “wrong number relationship” (in which men randomly call numbers until a woman picks up, who they engage in conversation with the aim of developing a relationship; see Huang 2018). The boy never arrived. Devasted, she jumped into the river but was rescued by the police. Her father refused to have her home, so now she was incarcerated in the Safe House until she was eighteen (Gardner 2024a). Other girls had escaped from abuse and “torture.” Seema, for example, had run away from her step-mother who had abused her (torture kore). The police had picked her up and she had been sent to the Safe-House (hand-over kore).

27The “marriage victims” politely recounted their details to the NGO lawyer. In listening to their stories, I was struck by the similarities. As Mehta describes in her work amongst Bangladeshi women prisoners in West Bengal, the narratives of the “marriage victims” were interwoven and shared common features. Perhaps their memories had become collective, repeating some tropes whilst omitting others (Mehta 2018:46). For example, husbands were often in their early twenties and working in call centers and many of the “marriage victims” reported meeting them whilst walking to school or college. Fatema and her husband had met during her walks to school, for example. They had fallen in love and married in secret but her parents found out and took out a case against her husband. In a month she would turn eighteen and could leave the Safe House since legally she would no longer be a minor. When asked by the lawyer what she wanted, she replied: “to be with my husband.” The lawyer retorted that she should prioritize blood ties over romance, return to her parents and her education. If she continued with her marriage, she would waste her life having babies. She was very young and should not be causing problems for her parents.

28As mentioned earlier, two of the young women had converted from Hinduism in order to marry Muslim men. Talina, for example, had married a fellow student. She was sixteen and said that her family would never accept either her conversion or the marriage. The lawyer told her that the relationship could never work because Talina and her husband were students with no means of support. If she waited until she was older, and married a man her parents approved of, she could have a good life. Another Hindu convert, aged seventeen, was told that romance was “all in the mind.” Other girls reported being nineteen or twenty. Their parents had forged their documents, they said. They were being held in the Safe House against their will.

29Later, whilst the Safe House and NGO staff were distracted some of the “marriage victims” elaborated on their cases for my research assistant and I. Hiding from the disapproving Safe House staff in a small room on the ground floor, they recounted colorful stories of love, elopement and vengeful fathers who sued in-laws and husbands for assault, kidnapping and rape. Two of these stories were recorded in Bengali on my phone. Taila’s story was particularly dramatic. She met her husband-to-be on Facebook. When her parents tried to force her to marry another man she told her Facebook fiancé that she would kill herself unless he saved her. They met at Dhaka airport and, after missing their flight and a long bus journey, ended up in Rajshahi where her parents-in-law took her in and they married. Unfortunately, Taila’s parents tracked her down via her mobile and arrived in Rajshahi, pretending to approve of the marriage. It was a trick. When she agreed to return to Dhaka with them, they confiscated her phone and locked her in their house. Her father bribed the judge, she said, for after she was subjected to virginity testing by the police a case was taken out against her husband and in-laws for rape and kidnapping. She went to prison for two days. She was told she would be free if she agreed to end the marriage, but she refused so now was at the Safe House. When I was temporarily out of the room, Taila borrowed my research assistant’s mobile and frantically called her husband. He told her that he had already appeared in court; no-one had told Taila the date so she could not attend to defend him against the charges.

31As deeply as I loved you, so my heart is wounded.
Once the heart was full of love
Now that same heart is consumed by fire
What was meant to be?
What has happened?
What was I supposed to gain?
What has happened?
By loving, what has happened?

33The Safe House Director was more direct in her judgement. When the girls complained about their living conditions—the mosquitoes, terrible food, dirty water and lack of fans—I overheard her say to the NGO lawyer “Fine, that’s good. For them this is perfect. If you leave your parents, this is what you get.” (Tik ache. Bhalo hoyse. Order jonno perfect. Baba ma chere ashle amoni hoye). As we left, I heard screaming coming from the Director’s office. As we passed the open door, I saw that Talia was being forcibly held down by two visitors—her parents—whilst they rubbed a potion into her hair. It was jhaddu, my research assistant explained, a spell to stop Talia from loving her husband. Finally breaking free, Talia ran from the office in tears. The Director looked on without comment.

Conclusion

35The second trope, appearing in the lawyer’s tutoring, is of gender empowerment, chiming in with the agendas of international funding agencies. Here, women find fulfilment and equality via education and careers. The counter discourse, of sacrificing everything for love, throws this into disarray, demonstrating female agency of the wrong sort. By categorizing these young women as “marriage victims” the disruptive potential of their sexual agency was quashed, at least bureaucratically. This returns us to Mookherjee’s invocation of the “combing over” of birongona in Bangladesh by rights activists (Mookherjee 2015). As I have shown, a similar process of “making up” goes into the creation of victimhood via the “regimes of care” provided by the state and NGOs and funded by western donors. At the Safe House, the categorization of “marriage victim” displays the success of the 2017 Bangladesh Child Marriage Restraint Act, for the existence of victims proves the expediency of the Act, which feminists from the human rights NGOs had lobbied for. By labelling them “marriage victims” the problematic of teenage girls marrying was highlighted, but the reality of their cases, involving young women choosing love relationships over the diktats of their families, and the abuse many had experienced along the way, remained concealed.

36The “making-up” of unruly young women into victims is not merely cosmetic. As we have seen, victimhood engenders the “armed love” described by Ticktin (2011). Within the “regimes of care” I have described in Dhaka, shelter and protection are provided for victims of domestic violence and young women and children who are out-of-place. Yet whilst NGO shelters provide comfort and support for out-of-place girls like Sanny and victims of domestic violence like Salina, “armed love” can tip into enforced carcerality, especially where the category of victim has slid from “innocent” to “delinquent” (Ticktin 2011:5). As delinquents, who have refused to stay in their places, the “marriage victim” must be forcibly contained, physically disciplined by the harsh living conditions and locked into dorms without beds in case these are used to stage another escape. They are indeed victims, not of underage marriage, but rather their families, the state and even the NGOs who are unwittingly or otherwise complicit in their carcerality,. As with the Indian cases described by Chowdry, Mody and Basu, by listening to the stories of these young women, we see how in Bangladesh too, the state supports patriarchal kinship, and when teenage girls choose their own marriage partners against the wishes of their parents, carcerality often ensues.