Still, Khan wasn’t deterred. For years, she did freelance stories on crime and corruption until finally a major paper, the Daily Jugantor, offered her a job in 1999.
In 1993, she wrote her first stories about violence against women. These types of stories just weren’t being reported in Bangladesh, certainly not with the human rights angle that Khan used. She got her idea from her parent’s work as social workers. Observing her mother, she had seen first-hand the types of abuse that women endure. In her stories, she eloquently told the intimate stories of abused women, some of whom were called “floating women” because they sometimes lived in abandoned buildings, other times on the street. She also wrote about women who were virtually enslaved by their bosses. She said she knew the fundamentalists were “going to be against it” but that didn’t stop her.
In the past, people looked on women who were victims of violence as sad cases but Khan painted word pictures of these women and their lives and talked explicitly about how their human rights were being violated. This made them real, accessible. She said that put a different light on the picture and it also helped gain the trust of readers.
In the last decade, partly as a result of her reporting, “people are more aware of [violence against women]” and individuals are more likely to report such crimes, she says. Reporters have begun to cover these same types of stories as well.
In 1999, Khan was working full-time for her first newspaper, Daily Jugantor, when she wrote about a maid who had been raped by her boss and kicked off his balcony. The maid broke her leg in the fall. Writing about the scandal had huge ramifications within Khan’s newspaper, where “some of the higher-ups at the paper were friends of the businessman,” she says. Although some male reporters also covered this story, Khan was the only one to lose her job over it.
That made her an attractive hire for a larger publication, however. Less than a year after the furor about the businessman and his maid, she was hired by Shaptahik 2000, (Weekly 2000) whose owner, Mahfuz Anam, had been a freedom fighter during the 1971 war between Bangladesh and Pakistan, like her parents. He never interfered in her reporting “and encouraged me to write about what happened.”
In the last ten years, Bangladesh has become increasingly dangerous for journalists against a backdrop of what the Committee to Protect Journalists calls “rising religious fundamentalism, increased political tensions and regional lawlessness.” Three reporters were murdered in retaliation for their work and scores more were attacked or received death threats.
In 2004, that violence engulfed Sumi Khan. Three unidentified assailants tried to pull her from the rickshaw in which she was riding. In the process, they cut her forehead, mouth and hands with a knife. This was in the port city of Chittagong, which is notorious for illegal lumber and arms dealing. Khan says the men shouted at her: “You have gone too far. You are very daring and you should not be.”
Her bosses, she says, were very concerned but her attackers remain at large.
Recently she has switched from the weekly to a daily newspaper, the Daily Samakal, where her beat is the Bangladeshi mafia. She was brought on because of her expertise. “That’s another challenge,” she says.
Khan says that religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh “definitely have a lot of influence, especially now. They are going to the women who have been home all day and are making her into a conservative, brainwashing her, turning women against women. They are requiring even 11-year-old girls to cover themselves. And they used to have only little boys in the madrassas. Now there are also a lot of girls. It is very alarming.”
On the plus side, Khan says the fundamentalists don’t have total control of the population or the popular thought of Bangladesh. She says she gets support on stories she writes, both from core groups and from key individuals in her country.
Khan points to several role models. First are her parents, who were freedom fighters in the 1971 war when Bangladesh sought liberation from Pakistan and who remain idealists who fight against corruption. Khan says that during this war, her father was an activist who was abducted by the Pakistani army and severely tortured. He was eventually released. During that time, her mother watched Khan and her elder brother (both babies at the time) while carrying on with her job as a social worker. She says she is carrying on their crusades, to “give back to the country,” to bring up issues such as corruption and the cases of people who are wrongly victimized.
She also had a journalist role model, Monazat Uddin, a man she never met. He was in his prime when she was six or seven, covering “all the major stories in Bangladesh, including trials. He was very much talked about in my family. They talked about him almost as a hero, almost as a Robin Hood, someone who brings out the real truth,” she says.
Watching him at a very young age, she made up her mind to be a reporter. She never met the crime reporter who was her arms-length mentor. He died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 47.
Khan is convinced journalism is her calling and she refuses to second-guess herself on controversial stories. She says she did what she felt was right. Now, with more experience, she says she “feels more confidence” in being a reporter, which gives her more internal freedom to tackle even more challenging stories.
Khan worries about the extent to which her coverage of risky stories endangers her parents or her two sons.
But she is proud to be part of a global movement of “honest journalists, doing good work, fighting injustice.” She feels a part of that family -- even though there are no groups of journalists in Bangladesh organized around those reform principles. “It’s not possible. There is opposition to it. And the number who are doing this is relatively few,” she says.
Khan’s own definition of courage? She says it is the absence of fear. She doesn’t believe in fear and says that must be a “genetic trait” inherited from her parents. “They never feared. They just went on and lived.”