THE death of a minor boy who died after his fellow worker in a factory in Gazipur is reported to have pumped air into his rectum with a compressor on April 2 is grisly. Both the boys, in their mid-teens, as the police said, were cleaning each other’s clothes by using the air compressor after finishing their night shift on the day. The police also said that the boy, who the police arrested, had planned a prank on the boy, junior by a year, who felt unwell and, later, died. But this is not the first such incident but is the latest in a series of incidents that have taken place over some years with underlying criminal intent. In May 2019, a man died after his fellow worked had pumped air into his rectum in Pabna. In September 2017, a teenaged boy died after his fellow worker pumped air into his rectum in a factory in Bogura. In December 2016, a spinning labourer in Narayanganj died at work after air had been pumped into his rectum. In august 2016, a boy died at Mohammadpur in Dhaka after air had been pumped into his rectum. In August 2015, a teenaged boy died after his former employer, aided by an associate, had pumped air into rectum as he had changed job.

While a few of the incidents created a furore, others went down into oblivion without making any noise. It is for certain that the justice dispensation process has something amiss and the same incident happened again and again. Justice having been delayed or not having been ensured in earlier cases may have prompted a repeat of it. But there are some psychological issues to it that family, society and the government have left unattended. A man doing this to another out of anger or as a means of punishment is certainly a law and order failure. The government has failed to impress on people that this is a crime of a serious degree. A boy playing such a prank on another boy suggests that society, which subsumes family and the government, has failed to deal with such issues in the upbringing of the children. It appears that there are also some shortcomings on part of the factory owner or management that has failed to properly train workers in the use, abuse and misuse of the tools that they employ in their everyday chores. It is, therefore, imperative that the government should attend to the issue at hand by dealing with the problem on all fronts possible — legal, societal, familial and educational.

The government must, therefore, step up the law enforcement and ensure early justice dispensation to stop the repeat of such crimes. The government must also help society and family to deal with the issue by ensuring a proper upbringing of the children where people learn to tell the right from the wrong.