‘I feel trapped’: Rohingya girls forced into abusive marriages in Malaysia

And so, the teenager – identified along with other 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 pyjamas. 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.”

All the girls interviewed 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.

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 neighbours and fatally shot her aunt. “I wasn’t ready to be married, but I didn’t have a choice.”

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 per cent of the Rohingya who have survived the Andaman crossing have been women and children, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency.

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‘Parasites’: Refugees face rejection in Indonesia as boat arrivals surge

‘Parasites’: Refugees face rejection in Indonesia as boat arrivals surge

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.

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“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 organisation’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 jewellery 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 centres, 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.

Forced out of Myanmar ‘like dogs’, Rohingya refugees face persecution in India

Local gangs, meanwhile, terrorised Begum’s family, once kidnapping Azizul and holding him until Begum borrowed 50,000 taka (US$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.”