Temporary solutions do little to help Rohingya women

Every so often, news reports surface to remind us of the painfully perpetual existence of the Rohingya crisis in our very own backwaters. It merely recedes from view from time to time. The headlines change, the focus areas shift, but the lives of the Rohingya at the centre of the news stories remain suspended in the same uncertain void—one shaped by displacement, abuse, repression and a future that continues to remain elusive.

The latest media reports from Al Jazeera and other international news outlets draw attention to a rise in early marriage among Rohingya girls, linking it to shrinking humanitarian aid, school closures, and the gradual dismantling of protection programmes in the refugee camps in Bangladesh. The concern is justified. The pattern is disturbing. But it is also unsurprising and predictable.

For Rohingya women and girls, vulnerability has been constant, layered, and cumulative. Long before aid reductions became the focus of international reporting, their lives were already defined by statelessness, restricted movement, limited access to education and work, and the persistent uncertainty of camp life. What we are witnessing now is not the emergence of a new crisis, but the intensification of an old one.

Early marriage, in this context, is frequently framed as a cultural practice of the Rohingya community resurfacing under pressure. It is an over-simplified explanation. By directly linking the problem to the Rohingya community, this narrative framing allows external actors to observe the situation from a safe distance with concern, while remaining unimplicated. Yet, such narratives hide more than they reveal. When families are forced to make decisions under conditions of protracted insecurity and exploitation, those decisions are rarely about culture or tradition. They are about real-life risks, survival, and the erasure of options.

When food rations are reduced and schools close, survival becomes a real threat. For many families, marrying off a daughter is seen not simply as an economic relief, but as a form of protection: from trafficking, from uncertainty, and from sexual violence in overcrowded camps, where privacy is scarce and accountability non-existent. In spaces where adolescent girls and young women face harassment day in and day out—many avoid going to the bathroom after dark in fear of criminal gangs—marriage is often seen as a shield, which is mostly illusory. That reality becomes visible later.

The tragedy lies not only in the act of early marriage itself, but in the conditions that make it appear reasonable. These conditions do not emerge spontaneously. They are created through flawed policy decisions, deteriorating funding crisis, and a humanitarian response that has mostly been sluggish at best.

What recurrent news reports on the crisis of Rohingya women suggest is the broader environment in which these marriages take place. Girls who remain unmarried are increasingly exposed to sexual exploitation, including coerced or paid sex work driven by hunger and desperation. Women take on informal, unsafe work—both inside and outside the camps—where abuse is common and recourse almost non-existent. Girls disappear from classrooms not only into marriages, but into domestic labour, factories, or shadow economies shaped by exploitation and fear.

Trafficking networks operate most effectively in such environments. Promises of work, safety, or marriage become tools of deception, drawing women and girls into situations of forced labour, domestic servitude, or sexual manipulation. These outcomes are often discussed as separate crises, each demanding its own response. In reality, they are interconnected expressions of the same systemic deprivation. When economic opportunities are denied and movement is restricted, exploitation does not arrive as an anomaly; it becomes an alternative.

Much of this unfolds quietly. Sexual abuse and exploitation are underreported not because they are rare, but because stigma, fear, and the absence of trustworthy reporting mechanisms keep them hidden. As protection services are cut, the few spaces where women might seek help shrink further and violence is often simply overlooked.

There is also a striking contradiction at the heart of the global humanitarian response to the Rohingya crisis. Internationally, there is no shortage of rhetoric about protecting women and girls, combating trafficking, and ending child marriage. These commitments feature prominently in policy statements and development agendas. Yet in practice, they appear remarkably shallow, vulnerable to shifting geopolitical priorities and donor agendas. Protection that depends on funding cycles is, by nature, temporary. And temporariness is precisely what Rohingya women can no longer afford.

These women are often portrayed as passive recipients of aid and abuse, but this portrayal does them a disservice. When education, skills training, or livelihood opportunities have been available, women have engaged with determination and purpose. They have demonstrated resilience through daily acts of endurance and adaptation. The problem has never been proper utilisation of available agency. It has been the steady erosion of the same.

What's more troubling is that prolonged crises often erode urgency. Practices that would once have provoked outrage, such as early marriage, forced labour, sexual exploitation, begin to appear as regrettable but expected realities of camp life. This normalisation is the outcome of concern without concrete action. For Rohingya women and girls, these gaps shape their futures and life trajectories in ways that are irreversible.

What is unfolding today at the Rohingya camps is not simply the result of displacement, uncertainty, or poverty taken separately. It is the outcome of a sustained failure to provide protection that is lasting, rights-based, and sensitive to gendered realities. Temporary solutions for the Rohingya community have long outlived their usefulness. It is more than evident that piecemeal actions cannot resolve a long-standing, large-scale crisis.

More reports on the Rohingya will continue to follow, for sure. More stories will be told,  documenting preventable tragedies. The question, as always, is whether they will continue to compile a laundry list of consequences while leaving root causes largely unacknowledged, or whether collectively they will force a reckoning with the uncomfortable truth that this crisis persists not because solutions are unknown, but because responsibility has become too easy to defer.

For Rohingya women, the cost of that deferral is already being paid—quietly, repeatedly, and largely out of sight.

Tasneem Tayeb  is a columnist for The Daily Star. Her X handle is @tasneem_tayeb.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own. 

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