Shrinking aid, unchecked polygamous marriage, and deepening poverty are driving Rohingya girls into silence and debt-driven marriages
Originally published on Global Voices
Inside a Bangladesh refugee camp, a classroom of Rohingya children sing English songs at a UNICEF learning centre, funded by UK aid. Photo credit: Anna Dubuis/DFID via Flickr. CC BY 2.0.
This post is part of Global Voices’ July 2026 Spotlight series, “Statelessness.” This series offers insight into the issue of statelessness and how it hinders people’s freedom of movement, educational opportunities, political access, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.
Despite living in Myanmar’s Rakhine State for generations, the Rohingya remain the world’s largest stateless population due to a systematic denial of citizenship. Nine years after 750,000 Rohingya fled violence in Rakhine State to find safety in Bangladesh, nearly one million refugees remain trapped in 33 congested camps in Cox’s Bazar. That legal limbo has seized basic rights to schooling, healthcare, or protection under national law, leaving them entirely dependent on whatever aid arrives.
When a girl has no state to grant her rights and no functioning system left to enforce them, marriage becomes one of a family’s only pathways to give her a semblance of stability.
Maryam, a Rohingya child in Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, was 13 years old when her learning center closed. Her teacher noticed the absence first — an empty chair where a quiet, attentive girl used to sit. Within three weeks of the shutdown of schools after the USAID funding cuts in 2025, Maryam’s mother had agreed to a marriage proposal.
The groom was 34. A local religious figure told the family that since Maryam had reached puberty, delay was spiritually dangerous. Her mother — widowed, in debt, managing three younger children alone — accepted the reasoning. She also accepted the relief. The dowry asked for was barely two thousand Taka — roughly USD 16.
Nobody objected, despite the fact that in Bangladesh, the legal minimum age for marriage is 18 for women and 21 for men. The block’s Majhee, a community leader in that camp, prepared the contract.
Maryam is now 14 and pregnant. Her in-laws will not allow her to return to school, even as new learning centers slowly reopen nearby. Her teacher said, “When a girl gets married, she never comes back to the classroom with her small dream.” For Maryam, that is already permanent.
A widow’s impossible choice
Across 33 official camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf in southern Bangladesh, another story unfolded with quieter violence in camp 20. Suriya, a 40-year-old widow managing her household alone after losing her husband during the sea crossing from Myanmar, owed a debt she could not repay. Her daughter Fatima was 14. Their block majhee — a man in his mid-fifties with three existing wives, controlling food distribution and marriage registration for the entire block — had been offering help for months. Extra food. Debt forgiveness. Promises of protection.
Then came the proposal.
Suriya experienced it as the best available option in an impossible situation. As a policy brief, published by the Center for Peace and Justice, BRAC University, documents precisely: “In most cases, this marriage pressure comes from those who give and offer other forms of protection and support.” The majhee needed a fourth wife — in his community, that number is not excess but evidence of leadership. “If a majhee doesn’t have at least four wives, he is not considered a leader,” a humanitarian worker said during an interview. Fatima became a transaction. The marriage happened informally. No Camp in Charge (CiC) office approval was sought. No age documentation was presented.
These two stories are not exceptional. They are the pattern.
The numbers behind the silence
What is happening inside the camps rarely appears in a single dataset. Verified child marriage cases among refugees rose 21 percent last year, child abductions more than quadrupled to 560 reported cases, and armed group recruitment of children grew eightfold in 2025. A 2021 study on the usage pattern of contraception among Rohingya in the camps found the average age at first marriage in the camps was 15.7 years, and over 62 percent of Rohingya women in the camps were already wed before age 18. These figures were documented before the latest funding collapse and have likely only risen since then.
Patrick Halton, UNICEF’s child protection manager, connected the numbers to the school closures directly: “With the funding cuts, we had to downscale a lot in terms of education. It meant that children have not necessarily had things to do, and we’ve therefore seen this rise in children being married.”
A female teacher who teaches higher grades confirmed during the interview. “I have found a significant number of dropouts because of marriage in my classes,” she said. “When a girl gets married, she never comes back to the classroom with her small dream. Mostly, her in-laws don’t allow her to return to school.”
Faith, puberty, and the architecture of consent
Why do families like Maryam’s not resist? How does religious framing function? The logic circulating in many camps is specific: once a girl reaches puberty, she is marriageable, and delay invites sin.
The above-mentioned policy brief records a religious leader’s position directly — that as long as a child has grown up and the situation allows, parents must marry them to safeguard against fornication. It is the dominant operating framework for many families, especially those without educated male heads of household.
A humanitarian project manager, interviewed via email, described the reality plainly: “Girls are given in marriage before having sexual knowledge. They don’t know anything about sexual safety.” She added something more disturbing still — that many of these girls have no concept of what torture or rape means within marriage. “They believe the husband has the right to torture her,” she said. The violence is not hidden from these girls. It is pre-explained as normal.
Parental preference for religious madrashah education over the general stream of schooling deepens this architecture. This education focuses on basic Quranic recitation, and deeper Islamic jurisprudence operates alongside the official NGO-led learning centers. The camps also host around 1,000 madrashahs, which have become deeply trusted community infrastructure across 33 camps.
“Most parents don’t want their daughter to get a formal education at school. They prefer sending their daughters to madrashah for religious education only,” the same project manager observed.
This means that even when learning centers were open, they were fighting parental ideology.
When dowry collapses
Academic research shows that in Myanmar, child marriage was partly suppressed by the sheer cost of marrying — bribes to military officials, dowries ranging from USD 2,300 to USD 3,300, and additional formal fees. That financial architecture no longer exists in the camps. Dowry costs have fallen. No bribes are required. No military fees apply.
Previous research notes this directly: “In some cases, this means marriage happens before age 18.” The camp system, by removing financial barriers, inadvertently removed one of the few practical brakes on child marriage.
The camp ration system introduced further incentives. Because all refugees receive food rations regardless of household size, men can feed multiple wives without earning income. The traditional economic argument against polygamy — that a man must provide equally for multiple households — collapses entirely.
Silence, impunity, and the collapse of protection
Child marriage and gender-based violence in these camps happen, overwhelmingly, in silence. Camp-in-Charge (CiC) offices, the highest authority within each camp, have approval processes and age verification requirements on paper. In practice, the BRAC University policy brief documents widespread evasion — easy to accomplish because “CiCs do not have any monitoring team to investigate the issue deeply.” Marriages happen informally.
Majhees do not report what they have been paid not to report. Community members who witness violations often stay silent to avoid conflict with those who hold power over their rations, their shelter, and daily survival.
The result is a protection ecosystem that exists structurally but fails operationally. The girls are already married into households that forbid their return to school, already trafficked, already pregnant — they are not recoverable within this crisis response cycle.
The rise of child marriage in Cox’s Bazar is not a single-cause crisis. It is the product of layered failures that reinforce each other. Polygamous marriage, enabled by collapsing dowry costs and ration-based food security, concentrates women and girls as resources in the hands of powerful men.
Maryam’s chair in the learning center remains empty. Fatima’s silence continues as she is moved into the majhee’s compound. These are not tragedies at the margins. They are the logical outcome of a system that has run out of tools to protect the people it was built to serve.
The question is no longer whether child marriage is rising in these camps. The question is whether the international community, having cut the funding that protected these children, will acknowledge that it helped build the conditions for what is now happening.