Badabon Sangho – FreeFrom

About the Organization Contact and Service Areas Successes and Impact Innovative Solutions for IPV Survivors’ Economic Security Survivor Leadership Understanding Economic Harm in Context

About the Organization

Country

Bangladesh

Number of survivors served in a year

20 to 50

Languages

Bangla English

Groups most commonly served

Ethnic, religious, or other minorities Indigenous peoples, communities, or nations Refugees, migrants, or internally displaced persons Sex workers Women Youth, children, or adolescents

Type of organization

Grassroots/community-based organization Nonprofit or non-governmental organization (NGO)

Program model(s)

Holistic crisis response Rights-based economic justice Survivor-centered income generation Systemic change through strategic partnerships Transforming social norms through community-building

Contact and Service Areas

Email

ba**************@***il.com

Address

9/12, Block-D, Lalmatia, Dhaka-1207, Bangladesh

Service Area(s)

Bangladesh (Bagerhat, Khulna, Naogaon, Dhaka, Patuakhali Districts)

Successes and Impact

“While we are supporting the survivor, they are less vulnerable, and they are interested in going with us. . . . They know that the Badabon Sangho team members are very caring, and they have trusted us.”¹

Badabon Sangho supports community-driven initiatives that foster survivors’ long-term financial security and healing. Their success is grounded in community trust, deep grassroots organizing, and holistic accompaniment of survivors.

A trusted institution for both survivors and institutional networks

Badabon Sangho takes pride in how they have become an integral part of the communities they work with. Given the organization’s visibility and demonstrated ability to provide quality support to survivors, many survivors hold Badabon Sangho in high esteem and trust working with them. The organization has also become a prominent and trusted partner among institutions such as governments, lawyer networks, and other stakeholders.

“I think our program is very credible, and we already achieved the trust, we already achieved the reputation, and the women and girls in this community, they know, they believe that [our organization]’s program is the best one,” Badabon Sangho says.

Strengthening advocacy and organizational capacity through a community-based model

Badabon Sangho’s successes in advocacy are driven by their local movement-building work. They credit the power of the community base they have built for increasing the organization’s visibility among partners and media as a reputable resource. Their community base includes paralegal volunteers and women’s groups that build trust and enable referrals of survivors directly to the organization.

The organization’s collective action work relies on this communal power: “We also mobilize and organize collective action of the women’s groups by organizing rallies, human chains, press conferences,” Badabon Sangho says. “That way, journalists and other people know that this organization is working in favor of survivors. To pressure government officials . . . without any local movement—the government officials would not hear from you.”

Innovative Solutions for IPV Survivors’ Economic Security

“Since our inception, we have been working on economic justice . . . we are trying to address it in each and every program, which is helping women with economic empowerment.”

About the Program

Badabon Sangho focuses on women’s collective capacity to lead the fight for their economic and social rights. Village-based women’s solidarity groups form the foundation of the organization’s structure. Through peer support, organized protests, legal assistance, and policy advocacy, women work together to address economic harm—including denial of rightful land ownership, financial assets, and usage of water bodies by women fisher-folk. The organization offers further support by facilitating agricultural and other income-generating skills training to provide more pathways to economic security.

Badabon Sangho’s legal assistance program team is trained in confidentiality measures and survivor-centered approaches. This ensures that survivors are actively supported through the full legal process, which can be difficult, intimidating, or even dangerous to navigate alone. The organization also provides funding to survivors for travel, lawyers’ fees, communication fees, and more to ensure that survivors have the resources to forward their cases.

Program Development and Key Strategies

Badabon Sangho identified the following strategies as crucial to the success of their economic empowerment efforts:

Leadership development with participants
Grassroots approach powered by community-driven priorities

Leadership development with participants

“One of our key programs is Feminist Leadership Development, because we found that not only legal support or economic support is supportive, but also we need to build [program participants’] capacity,” Badabon Sangho says.

Badabon Sangho recognizes that leadership development increases a participant’s capacity to take on new responsibilities within the solidarity groups. This exposure cultivates skills such as strategic decision-making and the ability to organize collective action, leading to stronger community capacity and survivor self-determination.

Grassroots approach driven by community-driven priorities

Creative strategies for raising community awareness

Badabon Sangho’s creative approach to awareness-raising connects directly with the communities and survivors they serve. For example, they use familiar communication tools, including folk songs, stage performances, posters, and leaflet distribution, to educate communities about the negative consequences of gender-based violence and the resources Badabon Sangho offers to address them.

By using these culturally relevant and functional communication methods, educational materials become more inclusive and accessible to a wider audience. As a best practice, Badabon Sangho notes that organizations working with survivors “should have awareness programs so people can understand where they should go if there is violence against women.”

Countering backlash through community solidarity and connection

Badabon Sangho faces obstacles from conservative groups who oppose women’s rights in Bangladesh and condemn their work as a women-led NGO. The organization believes that patriarchal norms in their culture fuel this stigma, recalling that “our team members used to hear that we are provoking women and girls without any reason.” Badabon Sangho says that religious conservatives accuse the organization of promoting values that they deem dishonorable: “[Conservatives say] ‘They’re recruiting, they’re deploying women and girls as volunteers who do not maintain conservative clothes like the burqa.’” The organization adds, “Sometimes they criticize like that. That Badabon Sangho promotes women to go outside of the house and go for work and income.”

However, Badabon Sangho’s embeddedness within their communities helps the organization overcome this backlash. “This has been happening from the beginning of the program and the beginning of the organization, but it has not impacted us very much because we are continuing with our strategy, with our approach to mobilizing women and girls in groups and also recruiting local girls and women for volunteering as team members,” Badabon Sangho says. “Most of our team members are from their local area. . . . We have power and support in the locality, so we do not face problems. Gradually, more and more people get to know about us.”

Survivor Leadership

“In a nutshell, in our decision-making process, survivors are there, and in fact, some of our team members are also [survivors].”

Survivors are fully integrated in Badabon Sangho’s leadership structure and operations. Survivors serve on a committee at the head of the organization, as well as on women’s group leadership committees. Several staff members are also survivors, ensuring that the organization’s programming is survivor-led and centered. Moreover, Badabon Sangho consults quarterly with survivors in their programs to gather feedback on the quality and operations of their programs at the grassroots level.

Understanding Economic Harm in Context

Badabon Sangho’s focus on economic justice in their programs aims to address the economic harms their participants experience. Long-standing social norms and systems of discrimination, the prevalence of patriarchal violence in both private and community settings, and challenges faced by women migrant workers impact the economic security of survivors in Bangladesh. The following key factors shape how survivors experience economic harm in the country:

Discriminatory social structures compound survivors’ experiences of violence and economic vulnerability
Survivors experience patriarchal violence in both their intimate partnerships and communities
Women migrant workers face harassment and stigma when returning to their home country

Discriminatory social structures compound survivors’ experiences of violence and economic vulnerability

Survivors who are members of Scheduled Castes face specific challenges in gaining economic security

Badabon Sangho explains that the caste system, a rigid social hierarchy that divides groups into different social classes, is practiced in both Muslim and Hindu communities in Bangladesh. The organization notes that survivors who are members of Scheduled Castes—individuals belonging to the lowest social class, also known as the Dalit community—often do not have access to formal education or employment due to a long history of oppression, discrimination, and social exclusion.²

Badabon Sangho observes that belonging to a lower caste impacts these survivors’ experiences of intimate partner violence: “They are most affected by the violence of IPV. They don’t have the ability to report that violence.” Other organizations working with women from Scheduled Castes have also found that a high percentage of Dalit survivors in Bangladesh experience domestic violence, most cases remain unreported, and instances of violence and discrimination against Dalits overall remain under-investigated.³

Religious norms affect survivors’ economic security

Badabon Sangho has witnessed that, traditionally, many Hindu women in Bangladesh are considered ineligible to inherit property, a barrier that greatly impacts their economic security. The organization has also observed that Hindu women are not permitted to remarry after divorce; since most of these women face difficulties in earning their own income and rely on their spouses for financial support, Badabon Sangho has found that Hindu women report incidents of intimate partner violence at a lower rate than non-Hindus report.

Survivors experience patriarchal violence in both their intimate partnerships and communities

Physical and sexual violence in intimate partner relationships starts with economic abuse

Badabon Sangho observes that patriarchal expectations in intimate partnerships can lead to economic abuse. “When women try to [make] decisions on expenditures, when she starts to [spend] any money [by] her own choice, that is the starting point of the violence,” the organization says. Often, gender norms lead men to “think that he is the decision maker, and he will dominate the whole of the income and the whole of the money.”

“This is the way working women are affected by violence,” the organization says, noting that economic abuse frequently leads “to sexual violence and physical violence, and finally the divorce and separation.” Additionally, Badabon Sangho says that women who attempt to claim properties and inheritance land shares that they are entitled to also experience this type of violence—not only from their intimate partners, but from their other family members as well. Moreover, unless survivors have the capacity to deal with legal issues, they are often unwilling to disclose the violence they are subjected to.

Survivors are stigmatized and face harassment if they disclose intimate partner violence

Badabon Sangho says that harm-doers tell survivors that the violence “is happening due to a bad attitude or the inability of women to do household tasks.” The organization notes that harm-doers also subject survivors to bullying and spread derogatory rumors about them in their communities.

“Local people blame women for such situations,” Badabon Sangho says, observing that, “generally, the women’s only coping mechanism is to keep quiet and not argue,” creating a culture of silence around intimate partner violence. Badabon Sangho further notes that survivors “do not flee these abusive relationships due to lack of money, shelter, identity [documents],” emphasizing the critical factor of economic insecurity in gender-based violence.

Survivors encounter continued violence and insecurity both within and outside their own communities

Badabon Sangho has observed that survivors are vulnerable both within and outside their own communities. As survivorship alone can hold great stigma and impact economic security, Badabon Sangho says that survivors shunned by their own families “do not get any economic support and safety from their families.” What is more, “women from lower classes have less protection . . . [and less] power because of their economic problems,” making them even more likely to experience economic insecurity.

Badabon Sangho further explains that women who separate from their harm-doers may be sexually harassed or otherwise intimidated within their communities. Even women who resettle in a different area, away from their families and home communities, face difficulties escaping violence. “She has to get work from any employer. Most of the [time], she is affected by violence from her employer,” Badabon Sangho says, noting that, regardless of where women survivors decide to relocate post-separation, they face harassment or violence in numerous places, including at the police station, in court, or from lawyers.

Women migrant workers face harassment and stigma when returning to their home country

Working abroad offers opportunities for freedom and economic security but also increases exposure to harm in the workplace

Badabon Sangho works frequently with women migrant workers returning to Bangladesh, given that “a huge number of women from Bangladesh go to the Middle East as migrant workers.” The International Organization for Migration reports that a significant portion of the country’s population lives abroad as migrant workers, and Bangladesh has been one of the largest international remittance-receiving countries in recent years.⁴ Working abroad presents women with the opportunity to earn their own income and a path to escape violence from their spouses or families.⁵ However, women migrant workers are often subjected to harm by their employers, including restriction of mobility, withholding of wages, physical violence, and sexual abuse.⁶

Returnees struggle to meet economic needs and face gendered stigma and hate speech

Upon returning to their home country, women migrant workers face a number of challenges in attempting to re-integrate with their communities. The majority of these returnees lack a regular monthly income and struggle to repay debts and meet the daily needs of their families.⁷ Badabon Sangho says, “We support them in terms of legal aid and also rehabilitate them when they return to the country . . . not only with skills or money, but also there is a huge stigma and hate speech in the community because most people think that women who go overseas for work are not ‘good’ women.”

The organization explains that many people assume women migrant workers returning to Bangladesh have been engaged in sex work, and Badabon Sangho works with these returnees to combat hate speech and stigma. Regardless of returnees’ occupation abroad, the organization points out that this stigma specifically targets women migrant workers, noting, “They are all going there as a human, and like male [migrants], they are working there.”

Notes

Direct quotes are slightly edited for style and flow.
Sultan Md. Salauddin Siddique, The Situation of Dalits in Bangladesh. New York: Global Forum of Communities Discriminated on Work and Descent and The Inclusivity Project, 2023, https://globalforumcdwd.org/landmark-report-documents-harsh-reality-of-cdwds-of-bangladesh/; Goutam Kumar Dutta, Md Mostafizur Rahman, SM Monirul Ahasan, and Md Musfikur Rahman, “Narrating the Culture of Resistance in Harijan Community in an Urban Area of Bangladesh: An Anthropological Study,” International Journal of Information Systems and Social Change (IJISSC) 13, no. 1 (2022): 1-11, https://www.igi-global.com/article/narrating-the-culture-of-resistance-in-harijan-community-in-an-urban-area-of-bangladesh/303593.
Bangladesh Dalit and Excluded Rights Movement and International Dalit Solidarity Network, Discrimination Against Dalit Women in Bangladesh: Alternative Report to the 65th session of the UN Commission on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, October 2016, https://idsn.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/CEDAW-65th-session-alternative-report-by-IDSN-and-BDERM-October-2016.pdf.
International Organization for Migration, World Migration Report 2024, Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2024, https://publications.iom.int/books/world-migration-report-2024.
Vani Saraswathi, “Bangladeshi Women: Sought After but Stigmatised,” Migrant-Rights.org, March 1, 2024, https://www.migrant-rights.org/2024/03/bangladeshi-women-sought-after-but-stigmatised/.
Tanzina Choudhury, Mohammad Morad, and Francesco Dellapuppa, “Lacerated Minds, Stolen Dreams: Experiences of Bangladeshi Women Migrants in Saudi Arabia,” International Sociology 39, no. 1 (2024): 50-70, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/02685809231207035.
Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies, “BILS Research Report Sharing on Returnee Female Migrant workers: Immediate Steps Demanded to Alleviate the Helplessness of Female Returnee Migrant Workers,” 2021, https://bilsbd.org/news/bils-research-report-sharing-on-returnee-female-migrant-workers-immediate-steps-demanded-to-alleviate-the-helplessness-of-female-returnee-migrant-workers/.