Sold as brides, lost at sea: The trafficking of stateless Rohingya girls

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.
Mahmudah, a 16-year-old Rohingya girl from Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh, hugged her parents goodbye in a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar and climbed into a trafficker’s vehicle packed with other children. Her family was destitute and terrified of Myanmar’s military and had accepted payment of roughly 18,000 Malaysian Ringgit (USD 4,395) from a Rohingya laborer already living in Malaysia in exchange for marrying their daughter once she arrived.
They called it a “bridal journey.” She left in the dark before dawn, her wedding photos still tucked into a plastic folder her mother kissed before handing it to the broker. The man promised that a boat across the Bay of Bengal would take her to Malaysia, where her husband — already working irregular jobs near Kuala Lumpur — was waiting in a rented room with a borrowed gold ring and plans for a new life.
Somewhere between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea, crammed on an overloaded fishing vessel, she disappeared when the boat capsized.
No official record bears her name; her family only has the memory of a farewell and the rumor that, like hundreds of others, she was swallowed by the water on a “marriage voyage” that became a trafficking route.
Another girl, Fatema, born in the camps after her parents fled the 2017 violence in Rakhine, had a different hope. At 15, she was already married to a cousin who beat her for talking to neighbors and for refusing to hand over the ration card. With school cut, no work allowed, and community gossip turning against girls who “stayed unmarried too long,” she saw no way out.
A local fixer told her that Thailand and Indonesia could offer “work and safety”, that she could escape her husband and send money home.
Instead, she was moved from one coastal safe house to another, her documents taken, her phone confiscated, and, once ashore, she was sold into a sex network in southern Thailand.
Her story, like many others, ends not with protection but with a new layer of abuse in a foreign country.
These are not isolated tragedies. They are emblematic of a pattern in which stateless Rohingya girls in Bangladesh’s refugee camps are pushed from early marriage and gender-based violence into maritime journeys that are framed as family reunification or escape—but in reality, amount to human trafficking.
Stateless daughters in a fenced-in world
In the camps of Cox’s Bazar, Rohingya girls stand at the intersection of every kind of vulnerability. More than 1.2 million stateless refugees remain fenced into some thirty-three overcrowded settlements, most of them women and children, almost none allowed to take formal work or move freely beyond the perimeter. Daily life is structured by checkpoints and ration cards rather than by school timetables or pay slips.
For adolescent girls, this means dependence on male relatives and humanitarian agencies for food, shelter, and safety — with very little control over their own futures.
As donor governments cut funding, the World Food Programme has repeatedly warned that monthly food vouchers — already reduced once in 2023 — would be slashed again, leaving families to try to survive on roughly half of what they once received. Humanitarian staff and child-rights workers began hearing the same blunt calculation from parents: if rations fall further, they will have no choice but to hand daughters over to brokers or send children onto dangerous boats in search of income.
At the same time, the few places that offered girls some breathing room have been disappearing. School closures and the shuttering of youth centers — direct casualties of budget shortfalls — have stripped away classrooms, play areas, and informal support networks that once helped shield adolescents from predators and early marriage. Community workers and teachers say that child marriage, kidnapping, and forced labor rose sharply as these doors closed, leaving girls more exposed in crowded lanes and in the private spaces where decisions about their bodies and futures are made.
“I don’t teach those girls anymore,” a female teacher who teaches higher grades said quietly. “I watch them leave instead. They disappear from the camp one by one, usually at night. When I ask the mothers where their daughters went, they tell me, ‘She has gone to meet her husband in Malaysia.’ But many of those husbands are just names given by brokers. The girls don’t understand that.”
She worries most about what the girls do not know. “They don’t understand what trafficking means,” she explained. “They think the danger is only the waves and the storm. They don’t see the danger in the promises. By the time they understand, they are already in the middle of the sea or locked in a room in another country.”
On the other hand, armed factions operating in and around the camps have issued religious edicts ordering women out of teaching jobs, constraining their public presence, and reinforcing obedience to husbands and male leaders. These directives make it harder for girls to imagine futures as students, professionals, or community organizers and easier for families to see marriage — any marriage — as the only respectable path.
When chronic poverty, collapsing services, and hardline social norms converge, the result is a perfect recruiting ground for traffickers. They walk into a landscape where marrying off a daughter is treated as both a financial release and a form of protection, and simply extend that logic across the water: promising husbands, work, and safety in other countries, while turning stateless girls into the raw material of a maritime trafficking economy.
A deadly passage for brides and daughters
The Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea have become some of the deadliest migration routes for Rohingya refugees in recent years. Around 6,500 Rohingya attempted to cross the Bay of Bengal in 2025; half of those were women and children.
More than 2,800 Rohingya undertook this perilous journey between January 1 and April 13. A single overcrowded boat that left Bangladesh on March 26, 2026, capsized in rough seas, with an estimated 250 people still missing.
When families decide who should attempt a dangerous crossing, they often choose daughters because marriage offers a socially acceptable reason for them to travel or because they believe girls will be “looked after” by husbands abroad.
When a boat sinks, the passengers lost are often adolescent girls — brides-to-be, teenage wives, or daughters trying to escape abuse — whose names are unknown to any official ledger.
Mothers and fathers sit in shelters clutching photos and scraps of paper with phone numbers that never connect, hearing rumors that boats went down near Myanmar or far from Thailand and grappling with the knowledge that their decision to send a daughter on a bridal journey might have been the decision that killed her.
When marriage becomes a ticket to sea
Over the last decade, marriage has quietly turned into a migration route. Within the camps, families talk about “good matches” with men already in Malaysia, Thailand, or Indonesia, often relatives or neighbors who left years earlier through irregular channels.
A groom abroad is imagined as an economic lifeline: someone who can send remittances back to the camp, secure housing, and perhaps offer a safer life than the cramped shelters of Cox’s Bazar. Brokers step into this hope with polished promises.
They convince parents that they can arrange the whole journey. From the camp to Teknaf, the southernmost town of Bangladesh, then by boat across the Bay of Bengal and onwards by land.
They frame it as a family solution — “Your daughter will join her husband, your burdens will lessen, and she will be cared for” — while collecting fees from relatives and cutting deals with smuggling networks.
Rohingya girls, many under 18, board boats believing they are brides in transit. Once at sea, the boat crew holds absolute power. If payments are delayed or families cannot pay the “extra fees” demanded mid-journey, girls are abandoned on smaller vessels or handed over to other traffickers as compensation.