Sycophants, party men and cronyA small initiative draws my attention. "Shahana"--- a cartoon series made by a group of school goers in a bid to stop discrimination, to build awareness and to reduce incidence of violence against women --- is finally being shown in classrooms. Educational content, taking full advantage of visual media, is employed to combat social maladies. Luckily this initiative got the much needed government support , which most private initiatives often failed to gather. Screening of this cartoon series comes at a time when the society descended into a collapse of law and order. Harrowing act of violence is purported on women everyday.
Feast on government money.
There is no short of excuses:
Fight poverty, education, woman empowerment.
Corruption has reached all departments.
Still stalkers on prowl,
Violence grips the soul.
Then there is the light,
Kids show how to fight.
They make cartoon for the class,
'Shahana' will build a new kind of mass.
Despite support and spendings by government, things have improved little over a decade. I took a look at government allocation on some selected social sectors over the last one decade. These allocations are meant to develop human resources. Allocations under consideration went to ministry of ICT & education, ministry of social welfare, ministry of labor, ministry of sports,ministry of health and family welfare and ministry of CHT. Data on allocation to some selected social sectors are readily available in Bangladesh Economic Review. Except one or two ministries, all the ministries undertake programs that develop human resources and create awareness on violence against women.
For instance, one of the ministries, ministry of education and ICT, saw an allocation bulge in the last one decade. But did government spending make a difference at the ground? Did they really achieve their intended goals? I try to probe the matter. In this regard, I gleaned data on victims of violence against women.
Odhikar put up data of violence against women on its website regularly. Rape victims and dowry victims are defined here victims of violence against women. So here victims represent these two categories of victims. I am interested to see how the number of victims changes in relation to allocations on key social sectors between 2004 and 2017. I split the data in two periods: 2004-2008, dubbed as pre 2009 election period and 2009-2017 , called here as post 2009 election period. Changes in number of victims in relation to allocation for 2009-2017 seem to differ from 2004-2008. It suggests a structural change. More precisely, a structural change may indicate two intercepts are different, or two slopes are different, or both the slope and intercept are different or any other combination of parameters. Meanwhile, no structural change means structural stability. I am keen where to probe whether the victim function has experienced any structural change in the two periods, meaning whether parameters of the function have changed.
With the help of dummy variable I constructed the following regression:
Victimsi = a1 + a2Di+b1Ai+ b2(DiAi)+ui
Where Victimsi are victims of violence against women, Ai is allocation to selected social sectors, Di=0 for period 2004-2008 and Di= 1 for period 2009-2017.a2is the differential intercept and b2 is the differential slope coefficient.
For the observations of the given period, I find that stability of the entire regression, no structural change, (a2=b2=0) is accepted by the usual F test(F=1.805, p= 0.2098, df= 3,10). Moreover, on individual inspection, the a2(t=-1.759, p= 0.108) and b2(t= 2.13, p= 0.059) are found to be statistically insignificant. So from the given data the test indicated that no structural change has taken place between two period.
The observations however did not include the victims' stat of 2018 and 2019. In the last two years, there has been a bulge in the number of victims of violence against women. This has happened while the allocations to selected social sectors have increased. And the statistical analysis just discussed little while ago shows variations of changes in victims' number are one same slope coefficient that prevailed in the period before 2009 election. So none with confidence can say increased allocations to selected social sectors led to bigger decline in the number of victims in recent years. For any given increase in allocations, there were no big decline in the number of victims.
Bigger allocations often do not translate into lesser number of victims. No one with confidence can say that government spending played a role in developing human resources and awareness building on violence against women. A quick look at the stat reveals that in 2006 total allocations were Tk 15725 crore and number of victims was 1008. In 2017, allocations were Tk 82324 crore and number of victims was 1045. Clearly there is something wrong the way government spends its money. It is spending so much but gaining so little.
A much prudent step would be to give support to private initiative like "Shahana". Public-private partnership could pave the path for combatting violence against women.
Targeting the adolescents and school goers, as " Shahana" did, could be an effective way to deal with the menace of violence against women. Government can reach out bloggers, content makers and other professionals to inculcate adolescents with a respect for women, their rights. At the same time, government can lend support to private initiative on sex education via social media so that adolescents know about it and dispel any ambiguities about this topic that deems taboo in our society.
This private initiative will not swallow huge money like government allocation. It only needs government support and patronage. Riding the tide of social media age, government with right attitude can undertake projects to connect public and private sectors in order to ensure gender equality and violence free society.
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