The 2005 interview with Dr Geoffrey Davis provides a rare retrospective account of the medical and humanitarian response to wartime sexual violence in Bangladesh after the 1971 genocide. Davis, an Australian doctor experienced in advanced pregnancy termination, travelled from London to Bangladesh in January 1972 after being recruited through Population Services International and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. His task was to assess the scale of rape-related pregnancies, perform abortions, and train medical personnel in hospitals and clinics across the country. He describes travelling from town to town with an interpreter and field officer, working in damaged medical facilities and treating women whose pregnancies were often already advanced.
The interview portrays rape as widespread, organised, and closely connected to the Pakistani military campaign against the Bengali population. Davis recalls women and girls being abducted, held in cantonments and military compounds, and repeatedly raped by Pakistani soldiers. According to his account, some women were separated according to their appearance and allocated to officers or ordinary soldiers. He also states that educated women and schoolgirls were deliberately sought, with some abducted while carrying their schoolbooks. Local collaborators, including Razakars, are described as assisting the military by identifying, abducting, and supplying women.
Davis gives graphic descriptions of the physical condition of survivors. Women held in military captivity were reportedly underfed, whipped, bitten, cut, and exposed to severe sexually transmitted infections. Some were killed after becoming pregnant, ill, or no longer considered useful. He refers to women raped in fields and then bayoneted, as well as women who died in cantonments following prolonged abuse. He also recalls treating very young victims, including a girl of approximately ten years of age. These recollections indicate that sexual violence frequently accompanied torture, captivity, forced pregnancy, and murder.
The interview also documents the post-war consequences of rape. Many survivors faced rejection by their families and communities because they were regarded as socially “dishonoured”. Davis recalls reports that some women rescued from military facilities were returned to their villages only to be killed by relatives. Others were pressured by male family members to undergo abortions before being permitted to return home. Women who had given birth were sometimes separated from their babies, and the transcript includes allegations that sedatives were used in certain cases to remove infants when mothers resisted adoption. The interview therefore reveals that survivors faced a second form of violence after the war through stigma, family coercion, and institutional control over their reproductive choices.
Davis speaks positively about Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s public recognition of raped women as Birangona, or war heroines. He regarded Mujib’s appeal for society to honour and reintegrate survivors as unusually courageous, given the social attitudes of the period. The interview also refers to the Bangladesh Women’s Rehabilitation Organisation and to women who travelled into villages and reception centres to counsel survivors, provide clothing, and arrange medical treatment. These efforts show that the newly independent state recognised wartime rape as a major national crisis, even though the rehabilitation programme operated under severe social, institutional, and medical constraints.
The interview is less reliable when discussing precise numbers. Davis acknowledges that estimates of rape and pregnancy were uncertain and that he was not a trained statistician. He recalls hearing figures ranging from hundreds of thousands of raped women to as many as one million pregnancies, but later describes such totals as largely notional. He explains that some figures were drawn from Bengali newspaper reports, missing-person records, field impressions, and extrapolations. He nevertheless accepts that the official figure of approximately 300,000 raped women was publicly used by the Bangladeshi leadership. His testimony is therefore strongest as evidence of the scale, organisation, and medical consequences of sexual violence, rather than as a definitive statistical source.
In relation to genocide, the interview shows that rape formed part of a wider campaign of destruction directed against Bengali society. Davis links sexual violence with attacks on schools, hospitals, intellectuals, women, and children, and describes mass graves and bodies continuing to appear after the war. His account suggests that rape was used to terrorise communities, break family structures, inflict reproductive harm, and destroy women who were targeted as members of the Bengali population. Although Davis expresses uncertainty about whether every soldier acted with an explicit intention to impregnate Bengali women, his testimony supports the conclusion that sexual violence was systematic and embedded within the broader genocidal campaign of 1971.
The interview must still be approached critically. It was recorded more than three decades after the events, contains uncertain dates and names, and includes personal opinions, offensive expressions, and unsupported claims unrelated to the central subject. Some passages reflect Davis’s prejudices and the language of his time. Nevertheless, his testimony remains historically important because he was directly involved in treating rape-related pregnancies and training medical staff during the immediate aftermath of the genocide. Read alongside contemporary documents, survivor testimony, and institutional records, the interview offers valuable evidence of the systematic sexual violence committed against Bengali women and girls in 1971 and of its enduring medical, psychological, and social consequences.
Source: https://archives.library.unimelb.edu.au/nodes/view/461146