Dream of a better life ends in nightmare
Traffickers use offers of marriage, job to lure Rohingya women, girls into sex slavery abroad; rescued overseas, many now trapped behind wall of red tape
For 29-year-old Taiyyaba Khatun, a Rohingya woman living in Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh, providing food for her children became an everyday struggle after she had a fall out with her husband.
“He moved to Cox’s Bazar and left me all alone to look after our five children. A friend of mine told me she can find me work as a maid in India. She put me in touch with a trafficker who first took me to Dhaka, and then across the border to India. But when I got there, he sold me to a man for Tk 30,000,” she said.
“He took me on a train and I ended up in New Delhi, where I was sold to a brothel. I cannot describe what I went through for the next few months there. I begged one of my customers to let me use his phone, but I couldn’t reach anyone. Then one day, I managed to escape.”
Taiyyaba wandered the streets of New Delhi, not being able to communicate with her broken Hindi, and ended up outside a roadside restaurant, exhausted and in tears.
Eventually, locals helped her reach a police station.
“From there, they moved me to a shelter with other women who had been trafficked from Bangladesh to India. There were some Rohingya girls there too.”
At the shelter, Taiyyaba found herself trapped behind a wall of red tape. Although she was trafficked to India in 2015, it took her almost four years to return to the refugee camps in Bangladesh, and even this was only possible via illegal channels, she told this correspondent recently.
“They kept saying they are working on my application, but I could not go back if my address in Bangladesh could not be verified. I am a refugee, how do I show any address other than that of the refugee camp?”
“I had left my children with my mother, and I was worried sick about them. In the end, she managed to raise enough money to pay another trafficker, who brought me back to the camps in Bangladesh.”
In January, Rab rescued 13 Rohingya women from a house in the capital’s Aftabnagar and arrested two members of a human trafficking gang.
According to an official statement, these men were connected to sex slavery rings and were planning on trafficking the girls to India and Malaysia.
“There is no clear data on the number of Rohingya girls being trafficked abroad from the refugee camps in Bangladesh, but there are definitely many girls who are ending up as prostitutes in India, Nepal, and even the UK. Once they leave the country, it is almost impossible to reunite them with their family members who are also refugees, even after they are rescued from sex slavery,” said human rights lawyer Razia Sultana.
Pinaki Sinha, executive director of Saanlap, an Indian NGO which runs shelters for victims of trafficking rescued within the country, added, “Even in the case of Bangladeshi victims of trafficking who are rescued in India, it can take two to three years to cut through the administrative red tape and arrange for their return.”
“When the person in question is a refugee, it becomes a more complicated issue for the two countries to resolve based on each case,” he added.
Asked, Additional Secretary Abu Bakr Siddique, who heads the anti-trafficking cell at the Ministry of Home Affairs, said he has not come across any requests of repatriation back to the refugee camps from trafficked Rohingya women.
“I cannot tell you about what happens in this scenario practically,” he said, adding, “But even in terms of Bangladeshi victims of trafficking, it can take time to verify their addresses and bring them back through the official channels. Without this verification process, we cannot bring anyone back, so how can we do it with refugees?”
This inflexibility over the verification of proof of address, which is a necessary condition for trafficking victims to be reunited with their families, means that refugees who cannot provide this can become trapped in the countries they have been trafficked to indefinitely.
This is the case for 17-year-old Hafiza, who was taken to India two years ago by a “family friend”.
Although her parents were at first reluctant to discuss the real reasons, her mother later confided that they were hoping to find a prospective groom for her.
“We trusted our contacts and found a good Rohingya man living in India,” she shared. “We did not even dream such a thing would happen. Once she went across the border, she disappeared. We didn’t hear from her for almost a year.”
“I cried for my daughter every day. How could this happen to her? Then one day, I got a phone call saying she was in a shelter in India. She had fallen into bad hands and had to be rescued from them.”
Since then, Hafiza’s application for repatriation back to the camps has been “under process”.
“I just want my daughter back home with me. I wish now that I had never tried to get her married. I just wanted her to have a better life in another country.”
According to Razia Sultana, who is also the founder of Rohingya Women Welfare, the promise of marriage and a better life is one of the most common ways to lure young girls out of the camps and into sex slavery.
“We try very hard to make families aware of the dangers of using these trafficking routes, and ask them to focus on educating and empowering their daughters instead,” she explained. “Now, there are many Rohingya women in the community who are working towards similar ends.”
Shamsun Nahar, who runs a training centre in Kutupalong (with donations from expatriate Rohingya) to teach embroidery and other crafts to Rohingya girls, is one such woman.
After she became a refugee in 2017, she received training as a psychosocial worker from an INGO, which she now employs to talk to the girls she works with.
“Our community is quite conservative and there is a tendency to marry at a young age, often as teenagers,” she said. “I try very hard to engage with the girls at my centre about the dangers of early marriage, especially the health related factors.”
“For most Rohingya families living as refugees in Bangladesh, the best they can hope for their daughters is to get them married to an expatriate Rohingya living in India, Malaysia or Thailand,” she said.
Noor, one of the teenage girls from her centre, agreed to this point of view. At only 14 years old, she has accepted an arranged marriage to a 22-year-old Rohingya man from Malaysia as a stepping stone to a better life outside of the refugee camps.
“My older sister got married at 13, so it is only natural it be my turn now. I heard my future husband is a good man with a steady income. I am happy with this decision, I don’t want to be a refugee forever,” she said.
When asked how she will reach her future husband in Malaysia, Noor says their families will “find a way.”
While there seems to be a general level of anxiety pervading the camps over the uncertainty regarding their futures, especially in the younger generations, more and more Rohingya girls are opting to forego marriage and work within their communities instead.
“Since we started working in the refugee camps in 2017, we have seen some big changes,” Erum Marium, executive director of the Brac Institute of Educational Development, told The Daily Star.
“At first the families were quite cautious about sending their daughters to the child- and adolescent-friendly spaces we had created, but a huge strength of this community is that they are very willing to engage, and over time, they were very receptive to our interventions.”
“For example, despite all the restrictions and strict gender roles, a large number of women took up the roles of Myanmar language facilitators at learning centres in the camps. The Rohingya youth are a vibrant and resilient group and are very open to new opportunities,” Marium added.
Rubina (15) is one such Rohingya adolescent with the hopes of working for the betterment of her community.
“Before I became a refugee, I dreamed of being a school teacher,” she said. “I studied in Rakhine and even when the authorities shut my school down, my father hired a private tutor for me. I want to keep studying, and I want to teach other Rohingya girls about the importance of being educated as well.”
“I would never get married at an early age, I know my rights,” she added defiantly.
Source: The Daily Star