As someone who's spent his life roughly equally split across Bangladesh and America, I thought I'd provide some perspective.

The questions I ask myself about this situation are:

1. Are the lives of the people who work in these factories better or worse as a result of these jobs existing?

The answer I end up arriving at repeatedly is that it is a resounding improvement in the lives of almost everyone. RMG factories empower women to provide for themselves in a way that nothing else in the country can. There simply aren't any other jobs for women in low-income brackets in Bangladesh and I personally know individuals who found the courage to break themselves out of abusive marriages and the ability to say no to marriages they didn't want because of the income they have from these jobs.

2. Could the factories be better?

Yes, absolutely. Most of the owners could obviously afford to pay employees better given the incredible amounts of wealth that the factory owners have accumulated and having gone to school with some of their children, I know quite a few factory owners personally. The reason they don't pay more comes down to simply business principles. The objective of a labor intensive business is to drive costs down the lowest possible amount legally. That is what they do.

3. What is the government's role?

This is pretty simple. They should raise the minimum wage for factory workers, create more stringent regulation and make great effort to ensure those regulations are followed. This is where invalidOrTaken's point about corruption comes in. Many of the factory owners are themselves members of parliament, or have spent a great deal of money getting one of their lackeys elected. On top of that, virtually everyone in a regulatory agency will take massive bribes to look the other way.

When the article talks about that girl's dream being a sewing operator, and you cringe because that sounds so depressing, realize that 10 years ago this girls only option would have been to get married to a rickshaw puller or shopkeeper and hope he wasn't abusive. Today, she can dream of a job, of moving up a ladder and maybe even becoming a manager some day. That's progress even if it comes with a whole host of issues.

My ex-girlfriend wrote a blog post similar to this one, accusing me of sexual assault. I volunteered to take a police polygraph test, hired a lawyer and initiated a libel suit. Fortunately, I didn’t need to go further because she suddenly changed my name & her story. But the experience was still stressful and scary. Many commenters vilified me because they assumed her information was true.

Prior to being falsely accused, I didn’t believe in false accusations. I couldn’t believe that anyone would tell a lie so insulting to victims. I still do believe that the vast majority of accusations are true, but I always reserve judgement because I know how it feels to be vilified in a blog post.

I applaud the author for sharing her experiences. This post is eloquent and courageous. Having said that, a blog post is not the right place to seek justice. In fact, the information here may interfere with a trial. I encourage her to delete this post and initiate a criminal trial in order to hold the perpetrator accountable.

> Microsoft Word is a tyrant of the imagination, a petty, unimaginative, inconsistent dictator that is ill-suited to any creative writer's use.

Microsoft Word was never designed to be an ideal tool for creative writing, programming, or any such thing. It was designed to help office workers produce business documents (a) quickly, (b) in a format that integrates with all the other programs in the Office suite, and (b) in conformance with whatever formatting and workflow requirements their employer already had in place. Microsoft probably consulted with a bunch of Big Business customers when they designed Office. Yep, the kind of Big Business that uses Java classes like EnterpriseBusinessInterconnectInterfaceFactoryFactoryFactory.

Type a few word, hit "Save", and automatically get reasonable default fonts and margins? Check. Type a few more words, make some typos, have them fixed automatically? Check. Certain words need to be italicized or underlined? Check. Certain words need to be in a different font? Check. Who cares if it's consistent, the boss wants it bold so just make it bold. Indent the first line by X inches, double-space here, single-space there? Check. All accomplished with a few clicks of the mouse. No need to learn any command-line programs, formatting \Syn\{TaX}, or keyboard shortcuts. It's exactly what the majority of office workers need. Bonus points if it also helps clueless parents design their daughter's birthday party flyer in pink and purple Comic Sans, but I don't think MS really cares because that market is miniscule compared to Big Business.

> I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother.

At the end of that novel, <SPOILER> Winston loved Big Brother. </SPOILER> Because he probably realized that no other program but Big Biz MS Word would fit the use cases that it was designed for. LibreOffice? Call me again when it gets the Review function right. Your average college professor isn't going to learn how to use a version control system to suggest changes to his student's thesis-in-progress.

I think there's a deeper cultural problem here: that the behavior of Joe had that much of an impact on Justine's life in the first place. There are women that would experience the same thing, but would not retreat into themselves in this extreme way. There are even women that would shrug it off. However, the response of Justine matches ancient societal expectations: if a woman has been violated, she loses all value.

Why would anyone still believe that in our modern society? Because like the vilification of gay people ('gay' and 'faggot' are still a word used by virtually everyone to put things down as 'unmanly' or generally 'shameworthy') it has has entered the undertow of culture, where it is less apparent, but just as strong.

When someone is raped, we say we understand that her life is shattered, that she will never recover. It's part of a general acceptance that certain events mean someone's life is 'over' (death of a child, significant other) and that they may never recover. This acceptance implies expectation. Stronger women are questioned, seemingly admiringly, but actually judgingly: 'How can you just continue living after this?' with a hidden 'you are supposed to have broken!'.

It's easy to say that being raped should be like breaking a leg: an unfortunate event that can happen during a lifetime in human society with all its strange and from which you can recover after some pain and trouble. The difference is of course that one was inflicted on purpose by someone in your social group, while the other is usually self-inflicted or at least accidental. That this makes a difference is actually part of the same problem: that if you've been bested by another in your social group, you lose status and value. This also has ancient origins and as a result has deep roots in our minds. A chimpanzee with a broken leg doesn't lose status if humans take care of its leg. It only loses status if it loses a fight.

What is the way out of this? Make a conscious effort not to believe these things anymore. Raise your children not to believe these things. Don't participate in them and scold everyone that does them. Teach them it doesn't matter if someone has asserted dominance over them and that their lives are no less valuable as a result of it.

Justine, please seek professional help. Find a therapist that will work on changing the beliefs that have caused you to experience this event so strongly and caused it to have such an influence. There are lots of women on whom a similar experience had a weaker effect. This is not because you are weaker: it is because of what you were taught during your life, because of your beliefs. It is hard to change beliefs. There are many emotions connected to them, which makes you recoil from touching them. A professional therapists will enable this process, after which I hope you will look back and think "why on earth did I believe those things so strongly that a single event could have such a strong influence on my life?!"

I'm glad this is out there. It's a tragedy that it happened at all, but it would be an even bigger tragedy if nobody else knew the consequences. I think everyone experiences that moment sometimes where you think "is this okay? should I say something?" And after you waver for a second, your decision reinforces itself and you end up doing nothing at all. Maybe you can even convince yourself that it was all okay in the end. After all, the consequences are invisible. Well, not this time.

I found two other perspectives on the story:

http://theotherzach.com/writes/2013/10/9/events http://blog.matt-darby.com/essays/i-am-the-other-developer

I'm particularly heartened by Zach's account. The police can prosecute assaults, absolutely, but they can't stop them before they happen. The community can. By setting clearer expectations of behaviour, recognising potentially dangerous situations and taking steps to ameliorate the risk, and by being willing to step in before anything goes off the rails, the community can stop this from happening again.

And, thanks to Justine, maybe they will.