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

Deteriorating conditions in Myanmar and at Bangladesh’s refugee camps are driving scores of underage Rohingya girls to Malaysia for arranged marriages

Malaysia is not a signatory to the United Nations’ refugee convention, so the girls – most of whom are undocumented – are considered illegal immigrants

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A 14-year-old Rohingya child bride sits on the floor of her bedroom in Kuala Lumpur. Photo: AP

Published: 4:00pm, 14 Dec 2023Updated: 2:38pm, 1 Jan 2024

In a bedroom in Malaysia that has become a prison, a 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, in an arranged marriage.

It wasn’t her choice. 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 neighbour found a man in Malaysia who would pay the 18,000 ringgit (US$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 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.