Study Overview

Medio-legal evidence in the court of law is crucial for legal action against sexual perpetrators. Until recently in many South Asian countries, the ‘Two-Finger Test’ (TFT) was used as forensic evidence to determine the occurrence of rape experience by sexual assault victims. TFT is performed by medical practitioners by inserting two fingers into the vagina of a rape survivor to determine if the hymen is broken, as well as to “test the laxity of the vagina”. The test was also used to term rape survivors as “habituated to sex” due to past sexual intercourse to cast doubt on the moral impropriety of the survivor, ignoring the main issue of consent (Hossain 2016). The effectiveness of such physical examinations of rape victims is questionable since such it is usually delayed from a medical standpoint (Huda 2022). Furthermore, forensic medical exam can also add psychological trauma and physical discomfort of the victim. While many countries have reverted these regressive medio-legal practices that humiliate and further traumatize rape victims, until 2018, Bangladesh officially used TFT to provide medio-legal evidence of rape occurrence among sexual assault victims. In 2018, after years of advocacy initiated by SAFE, an icddr,b led project in collaboration with women’s rights groups in Bangladesh, the Supreme Court banned the use of TFT to provide medio-legal evidence for rape cases terming the practice as unscientific, inconclusive, and degrading with no forensic value (BLAST 2018). To date there has been no data on the extent to which this prohibition is being upheld in practice. We intend to address this gap in the knowledge with the goal of supporting improved implementation of this ban.