Rising polygamy: Cost of being a woman in Rohingya camps

Bangladesh, Education, Human Rights, Infographics, Myanmar, Refugees Issues, Religious Rights

When Sukran* sat on a fishing trawler to cross the Bay of Bengal and change her life for the better, she thought for a split second that, had she gotten a marriage proposal from a “decent” family, from a man with a job, she would not have started this deadly journey to Malaysia.

Those were Sukran’s words when we first met in 2020, after she was rescued from a fishing trawler with 396 other survivors around mid-February, after spending 55 days adrift in the Bay of Bengal. Cut to 2022: Sukran is married.

ALSO READ THIS: ROHINGYA MAN SHOT DEAD AT COX’S BAZAR CAMP

Her husband is a middle-aged man with five children. Sukran is his second wife and is now pregnant with her second child in the Rohingya refugees camp. This is not how Sukran wanted her life to be, as I recall. “Anyway… I have a secure life now. His first wife lives in another camp. My marriage gave me security. You know how men behave with an unmarried girl. It’s better for a girl to get married when she is still entering puberty. Unmarried girls are not safe around men,” Sukran tells me.

Over the last four years, polygamy has increased in Rohingya refugee camps due to the social, cultural, and religious dynamics of the community. This was not the case when they were in Myanmar. A special order was issued only for Muslims of Rakhine state in the 1990s. It stated that, without an identity check and official permission from Burma’s border security force NaSaKa and Burma’s Military authorities, Rohingya marriages could not take place in Myanmar.