In a bedroom in Malaysia that has become a prison, the 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.
It wasn’t her choice. But her family, she says, was impoverished, hungry and terrified of Myanmar’s military, which attacked the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority in 2017.
In desperation, a neighbour found a man in Malaysia who would pay the 18,000-ringgit (USD 3,800) fee for the girl’s passage and — after she married him — send money to her family for food.
And so, the teenager — identified along with all the girls in this story by her first initial to protect her from retaliation — hugged her parents goodbye. Then M climbed into a trafficker’s car packed with children.
Deteriorating conditions in Myanmar and in neighbouring Bangladesh’s refugee camps are driving scores of underage Rohingya girls to Malaysia for arranged marriages with Rohingya men who frequently abuse them.
