'I feel trapped': Scores of underage Rohingya girls forced into abusive marriages in Malaysia
World
‘I feel trapped': Scores of underage Rohingya girls forced into abusive marriages in Malaysia
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — In a bedroom in Malaysia that has become a prison, the 14-year-old girl wipes away tears as she sits cross-legged on the concrete floor. It is here, she says, where her 35-year-old husband rapes her nearly every night.
Last year, the Rohingya girl sacrificed herself to save her family, embarking on a terrifying journey from her homeland of Myanmar to a country she had never seen, to marry a man she had never met.
It wasn’t her choice. None of this was. Not the decision to leave behind everything she knew, nor the arranged marriage for which she was not ready.
But her family, she says, was impoverished, hungry and terrified of Myanmar’s military, which unleashed a series of sweeping attacks against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority in 2017. In desperation, a neighbor found a man in Malaysia who would pay the 18,000 ringgit ($3,800) fee for the girl’s passage and — after she married him — send money to her parents and three little siblings for food.
And so, the teenager — identified along with all the girls in this story by her first initial to protect her from retaliation — tearfully hugged her parents goodbye. Then M climbed into a trafficker’s car packed with children.
She didn’t yet know the horrors that awaited her. All she knew then was that the weight of her family’s survival was on her slender shoulders.
She sits now in her bedroom in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, her thin frame cloaked in teddy bear pajamas. The room is devoid of furniture, its blank white walls chipped and stained. Dangling from the ceiling is a knotted rope, designed to hold a hammock for any babies her husband forces her to bear.
“I want to go back home, but I can’t,” she says in a small voice barely above a murmur. “I feel trapped.”
Deteriorating conditions in Myanmar and in neighboring Bangladesh’s refugee camps are driving scores of underage Rohingya girls to Malaysia for arranged marriages with Rohingya men who frequently abuse them, The Associated Press found in interviews with 12 young Rohingya brides who have arrived in Malaysia since 2022. The youngest was 13.
All the girls interviewed by the AP said they are held hostage by controlling husbands who rarely let them outside. Several said they were beaten and raped by traffickers and other men during the journey to Malaysia, and five said they were abused by their husbands. Half the girls are pregnant or already have babies, despite most saying they were not prepared for motherhood.
An apartment building is seen on Oct. 9, 2023, in a Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, neighborhood where Rohingya child brides live. Rohingya girls told The Associated Press they are often locked in their apartments by their husbands. (AP Photo/Victoria Milko)
An apartment building is seen on Oct. 9, 2023, in a Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, neighborhood where Rohingya child brides live. Rohingya girls told The Associated Press they are often locked in their apartments by their husbands. (AP Photo/Victoria Milko)
When asked if they had protested their parents’ decisions to marry them off, they appeared confused.
“This was my only way out,” says 16-year-old F, still haunted by her memories of Myanmar, where in 2017 she watched as soldiers burned her house, raped her neighbors and fatally shot her aunt. In the years that followed, so frequent were the soldiers’ gunshots in the night that she was terrified by the sound of her friends popping balloons in the day. “I wasn’t ready to be married, but I didn’t have a choice.”
Rohingya child bride, F, age 16, stands in an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Oct. 5, 2023. F came to Malaysia from Myanmar amid escalating violence from the military in her village. She married her husband the same day they met. "I wasn't ready to be married, but I didn't have a choice," she said. (AP Photo/Victoria Milko)
Rohingya child bride, F, age 16, stands in an apartment in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Oct. 5, 2023. F came to Malaysia from Myanmar amid escalating violence from the military in her village. She married her husband the same day they met. “I wasn’t ready to be married, but I didn’t have a choice,” she said. (AP Photo/Victoria Milko)
Now trapped with a 27-year-old husband, she yearns for a freedom she and her people have never known.
“The Rohingya have no place to be happy,” she says.
These unwanted marriages are the latest atrocity bestowed upon Rohingya girls: from childhoods marred by violence to attacks where security forces systematically raped them to years of hunger in Bangladesh’s squalid refugee camps.
Global apathy toward the Rohingya crisis and strict migration policies have left these girls with almost no options. The military that attacked the Rohingya overthrew Myanmar’s government in 2021, making any return home a life-threatening proposition. Bangladesh has refused to grant citizenship or even basic working rights to the million stateless Rohingya wasting away in its camps. And no country is offering any large-scale resettlement opportunities.
And so the Rohingya are increasingly fleeing — and those who are fleeing are increasingly female. During the 2015 Andaman Sea boat crisis, in which thousands of Rohingya refugees were stranded at sea, the overwhelming majority of passengers were men. This year, more than 60% of the Rohingya who have survived the Andaman crossing have been women and children, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency.
In Bangladesh, Save the Children says child marriage is one of the agency’s most reported worries among camp residents.
“We are seeing a rise in cases of child trafficking,” says Shaheen Chughtai, Save the Children’s Regional Advocacy and Campaigns Director for Asia. “Girls are more vulnerable to this, and often this is linked to being married off in different territories.”
Because these girls live on the fringes of the fringe, accurate statistics on how many live in Malaysia do not exist. But local advocates who work with the girls say they have seen a spike in arrivals over the past two years.
“There are really a lot of Rohingyas coming in to get married,” says Nasha Nik, executive director of the Rohingya Women Development Network, which has worked with hundreds of child brides since it was founded in 2016.
Inside the organization’s small office in Kuala Lumpur, there are toys for the girls’ babies, stacks of educational kits about gender-based violence and a row of sewing machines where women and girls learn to make jewelry and other crafts they sell to help support themselves.
“There are no other safe spaces for Rohingya women in Malaysia,” Nasha says. “Domestic violence is very high.”
Malaysia is not a signatory to the United Nations’ refugee convention, so the girls — most of whom are undocumented — are considered illegal immigrants. Reporting their assaults to authorities, therefore, would put them at risk of being thrown into one of Malaysia’s detention centers, which have long been plagued by reports of abuse.
Malaysia’s government did not respond to the AP’s requests for comment.
To understand why a parent would send their child into this hell, you need to understand the hell from which they came.
Outside her bamboo and tarp shelter in one of Bangladesh’s camps, Hasina Begum’s sobs swallow her words as she speaks of her daughter.
Begum last saw 16-year-old Parvin Akter in 2022, when she sent her and Parvin’s brother, Azizul Hoque, on a boat bound for Indonesia. Begum hoped Parvin would make it to Malaysia to marry a man who could support her. But an AP investigation concluded the boat sank with all 180 on board.
Begum’s husband abandoned the family years ago, leaving her to care for their six children. The food rations weren’t enough to sustain them, and Begum couldn’t afford the traditional dowry that Rohingya brides’ parents are expected to pay grooms in the camps, typically thousands of dollars. The grooms in Malaysia forfeit dowries and often send money to the brides’ parents.
Local gangs, meanwhile, terrorized Begum’s family, once kidnapping Azizul and holding him until Begum borrowed 50,000 taka ($450) for the ransom.
Which is why Begum says she sent her daughter and son to Malaysia — so they, and the rest of her family, could survive. Even now, another boat carrying Rohingya refugees has been missing at sea for weeks, likely with other girls who may never make it.
Begum sits now amid the misery and the muck of the camps as the stench from a nearby latrine wafts by, wishing she could hear her children call her “mother” one more time. She pulls up a photo of them on her phone, then presses it to her heart.
“To be Rohingya,” she says, “is to suffer.”
