Protect the Child, Not the Pretext: Why Section 377 Is Not a Child Protection Law

A statement by 600 religious scholars answers a child's suffering with a colonial-era statute. Bangladesh deserves a serious child safeguarding response instead.

Minhaz Samad Chowdhury

Human Rights Defender, Governance and Public Policy Analyst & Researcher

On 15 September 2026, a statement bearing the names of some 600 religious scholars, mosque leaders, madrasa heads and teachers was released, calling for Section 377 of the Penal Code to be enforced strictly. The trigger was a report that a seven-year-old student had been sexually abused at a madrasa in Savar. Every person of conscience should be shaken by that report. A child in a place of learning is owed absolute safety, and a child who is harmed there is owed justice, care and protection.

But the response matters as much as the outrage. Reading the statement alongside the critical commentary that followed, I am left with a plain conclusion: the statement mistakes a child protection emergency for a morality campaign, and in doing so it puts children at greater risk, not less.

Child abuse and consensual adult relationships are different things

Human rights law, child protection practice and ordinary moral reasoning all rest on one distinction: consent. Two adults who freely agree to a relationship are exercising private autonomy. A child cannot give meaningful consent to sex with an adult, and silence, fear or obedience to a teacher is never consent. Abuse is about power, age and coercion. It is a crime because of the harm done to the child, whoever the child is and whoever the abuser is.

The statement blurs this line. It asserts, citing unnamed "research", that gay and bisexual people pose a higher risk to children, and it asks for "exemplary punishment" and action against NGOs. No study, sample, method or author is identified. Six hundred signatures do not turn an unsourced claim into evidence; repetition adds volume, not proof.

What the professional literature actually shows cuts the other way. A widely cited 1994 study in Pediatrics reviewed 269 cases of child sexual abuse in which the abuser's orientation could be assessed. In only two of them was the abuser identified as gay or lesbian; in the large majority the abuser was a heterosexual partner of a close relative of the child. It is one clinic's data and should not be over-read. Still, it demolishes the generalisation, and the wider research consensus is the same: a man who abuses a boy is not, for that reason, a person with an adult same-sex orientation. The child's sex tells us nothing about the abuser's orientation. Abusers exploit access, trust and impunity.

Section 377 was never designed to protect children

Section 377 of the Penal Code of 1860 is a British colonial provision. It punishes "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" with imprisonment for life or up to ten years, plus a fine. Its wording makes no distinction between an adult and a child, between consent and coercion, or between a person harmed and a person who harmed. It places consensual adult conduct, coerced acts and bestiality in one clause.

That is why it is a poor child protection tool. A statute built around a moral category, not around the victim, invites the wrong questions. Was the act "unnatural"? Was there penetration? The relevant questions are these: How old was the child? Who held power over the child? Was there coercion or abuse of trust? What does the child need now?

Bangladesh also already has laws that centre the child. The Nari o Shishu Nirjatan Daman Ain (Prevention of Repression against Women and Children Act) and the Children Act 2013 exist precisely because child abuse must be prosecuted as child abuse. If there are gaps, whether in how sexual violence against boys is defined, how evidence is handled, or how cases move through courts, then fix those gaps. Do not reach for a nineteenth-century provision that was never about the child.

What enforcement of Section 377 would really do

The statement demands "strict enforcement" not only against those who harm children but against people based on who they are. Experience in many countries shows what follows. Laws of this kind are used for blackmail, extortion, arbitrary arrest and police harassment. They drive vulnerable people away from health services and away from the justice system. They make victims less likely to speak, because a boy who is abused may fear that reporting will expose him to stigma or even criminal suspicion.

Courts and human rights bodies have moved in the opposite direction. In Toonen v. Australia (1994), the UN Human Rights Committee found that criminalising private consensual adult conduct violates the right to privacy under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Bangladesh is a party. India's Supreme Court, in Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018), read down the same colonial provision as it applied to consenting adults, while leaving the law against child sexual abuse and non-consensual acts intact. That shows the two questions can be separated: protect children fully, and stop criminalising private adult life.

Bangladesh's own Constitution promises equality before the law (Article 27), protection from discrimination (Article 28), protection of the law for every person (Article 31) and protection of life and personal liberty (Article 32). Its obligations under the Convention on the Rights of the Child require the state to protect every child from sexual abuse, in every institution, whatever the reputation of that institution.

The real failure is institutional

The most telling passage in the public debate is a question the statement never asks: who was responsible for this child's safety, and what did they do when a complaint arose? In every country that has examined abuse in religious and other institutions, the same patterns emerge. Adults are left alone with children. There is no independent channel for a child to complain. Leaders protect the institution's name and the accused's standing. The complaint is hushed, the accused is moved on or quietly returned, and the police are never told. Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse documented these dynamics in detail, and its lessons apply to schools and religious institutions everywhere.

A serious response from religious leaders would therefore contain concrete commitments:

• A written child safeguarding policy in every madrasa, mosque school and residential hostel, with a named safeguarding officer.
• Rules against unsupervised one-to-one contact and rules for supervision of dormitories and sleeping areas.
• Background checks and a documented recruitment process for teachers and staff.
• A confidential complaints channel that children and parents can reach without going through the head of the institution.
• Mandatory reporting to the police and child protection authorities as soon as a complaint is received, with the accused removed from contact with children during the investigation.
• Medical care, psychosocial support and legal protection for the child and family, and protection from retaliation.
• Consequences for institution heads who suppress or delay a complaint.

None of this requires anyone to change their religious beliefs. All of it can begin tomorrow.

Faith, accountability and the rights of the child

Nothing here attacks faith or the millions of Bangladeshis who teach and learn in madrasas with integrity. People are free to hold and preach their religious convictions about sexuality; freedom of religion and belief protects that. The line is drawn at the state. Civil law must rest on harm, consent and equal protection, not on any one community's theology, however sincere or widely held.

Islamic legal tradition itself, as scholars have pointed out in the debate, distinguishes between a wrong against God and a wrong against another human being. A person who harms a child cannot settle the matter by repentance alone; the harm to the child requires justice, redress and protection. That reasoning points toward accountability for the abuser and an institutional duty of care, and away from using a child's suffering as a platform for a wider campaign.

There is also a fair-process point. Those accused in the Savar case are entitled to a proper investigation and the presumption of innocence, and the facts should be established by the courts, not by public statements or the media. The child's need for protection comes first, and due process for everyone comes with it.

What the government and civil society should do

• Ensure a prompt, independent and transparent investigation of the Savar case, with the child and family protected and supported throughout.
• Require child safeguarding standards across all education systems, including Qawmi madrasas, and publish inspection results.
• Resource and train police, prosecutors and medical examiners on cases involving child victims, including boys, who are often overlooked.
• Strengthen child helplines and community reporting so a child always has someone to tell.
• Resist calls to stigmatise any group of citizens as a proxy for dealing with abuse. Doing so hides the real danger, which is the abuser with access to a child and an institution willing to look away.

A child's safety cannot depend on whom society disapproves of. It depends on who is trusted with children, who supervises them, and whether a complaint is believed.

Bangladesh can honour its faith traditions and protect every child in the same breath. What it cannot do is let a pretext stand in for protection. The question that matters, and that any of the 600 signatories can answer today, is simple: what will you change in your own institution so that no child is left unprotected?

Minhaz Samad Chowdhury works on human rights, governance and public policy. This article reflects the author's views. It draws on the 15 September 2026 statement published by the Mullobodh Andolon and reported in the national press, and on commentary published on 16 September 2026. Details of the underlying incident are drawn from public reports and have not been independently verified by the author.