Bangladesh is moving to establish a special anti-cyberbullying cell under the Prime Minister’s Office to address harassment and violence against women and children, a proposal that has drawn attention to gaps in the country’s digital justice system and the need for a functioning support and enforcement structure.
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Data Points to a Wider Crisis
At a national consultation held in Dhaka on April 17, data from a 2024 Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics and UNFPA report showed that 89 per cent of women social media users in Bangladesh had experienced online violence at least once. Women aged 18 to 30 were described as facing the highest risk.
The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission said at the same consultation that it had received 13,023 content removal complaints last year, of which approximately 90 per cent were from women. The demand for protection already exists at scale, while the infrastructure to meet it remains inadequate.
There are figures showing that between 2013 and 2020, the Dhaka Cyber Tribunal secured convictions in 22 out of 2,669 cases, a conviction rate of 2.86 per cent. Almost 76 per cent of cybercrime victims in Bangladesh are women, while between 80 and 88 per cent never file a complaint. Among those who did report, approximately 80 per cent felt they received no meaningful help afterwards.
Backlog, Evidence Gaps and Legal Transition
Deepfake incidents targeting Bangladeshi women rose 19 per cent in the first quarter of 2025 alone compared with the entire previous year. As of August 2024, 5,818 cases remained pending across Bangladesh’s eight cyber tribunals.
A new cell routing complaints into the existing infrastructure would not change those numbers unless the system is redesigned to address evidence failures, investigation gaps and victim support. The low conviction rate as an evidence failure rather than a failure of judgment, saying cases were reaching tribunals without the forensic foundation required for prosecution.
The proposed cell is being discussed during a period of legal transition. The Advisory Council’s recent amendment to the Cyber Security Ordinance 2025 allows dismissal of all cases filed under the Digital Security Act 2018. This was a necessary corrective, noting that the DSA had been widely weaponised against journalists, dissidents and ordinary citizens. It also said 410 speech offence cases had been withdrawn across eight divisions, while thousands more remained pending.
A Blueprint Focused on Victim Support
Bangladesh’s cell should not be designed only as a complaint intake point, but as a legal infrastructure unit. It outlined five coordinated functions: victim support and case management, legal framework and enforcement, technology and platform accountability, judicial and law enforcement training, and public literacy.
The hotline should operate around the clock in Bangla and English at a minimum, with a digital intake option for women who cannot speak safely. Every case, according to the article, should receive a case number, a case manager and a trackable outcome, while performance data such as response times, case outcomes and conviction rates should be published every quarter.
Trained paralegals, psychologists and digital forensics specialists should serve as first responders, instead of relying only on law enforcement officers. It said Legal Data Annotators should review incoming reports for completeness, protect chain-of-custody integrity during evidence preservation, and track case outcomes to identify failures in the framework.
The AI Justice Lab, currently being established at BRAC University’s School of Law, is designed to serve as the cell’s research and training partner. The lab would train legal data annotators, develop 24-hour content takedown protocols, build a Digital Legal Aid platform and produce research to keep the cell’s framework current as technology and harms evolve.
Bangladesh does not need to copy Thailand’s model or import Singapore’s framework, saying the country has the legal architecture, institutional relationships, regional precedent and research base to build its own model.
