{"id":1076,"date":"2017-09-25T12:25:20","date_gmt":"2017-09-25T11:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/?p=1076"},"modified":"2020-02-19T15:21:39","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T15:21:39","slug":"expert-comment-female-rohingya-refugees-at-risk-of-forced-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/2017\/09\/25\/expert-comment-female-rohingya-refugees-at-risk-of-forced-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"Expert comment: Female Rohingya refugees at risk of forced marriage"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Dr Zaki Wahhaj from the School of Economics discusses the risk that young female Rohingya refugees are at increased risk of forced marriage as a result of their plight.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u2018In recent weeks the plight of Rohingya refugees <strong>who have arrived in Bangladesh to escape violence<\/strong> in the Rakhine province of Myanmar has received wide coverage in the international news media. The United Nations has documented graphic accounts of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/entry\/mass-sexual-violence-leaves-rohingya-women-traumatized-and-stateless_us_594bc784e4b0312cfb61f7e4\"><span style=\"color: #0066cc\">sexual violence<\/span><\/a> against Rohingya women and girls by Myanmar security forces.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Nearly <strong>half of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/09\/15\/world\/asia\/myanmar-rohingya-children.html\"><span style=\"color: #0066cc\">400,000 Rohingya refugees who have arrived in Bangladesh are children<\/span><\/a><\/strong> and, according to the Unicef, over 1,200 \u201cunaccompanied children are at particular risk for human trafficking, sexual abuse, child labor and child marriage.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018The Rohingya refugees are in a part of the world where a<strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.opendemocracy.net\/5050\/m-niaz-asadullah-and-zaki-wahhaj\/bangladesh-debating-child-marriage-law-and-patriarchal-traditi\"><span style=\"color: #0066cc\">family\u2019s sense of \u2018honour\u2019 is often tied to the perceived \u2018purity\u2019 of their daughters and brides<\/span><\/a><\/strong>. And, in a political conflict, this cultural belief can be turned into a weapon to be<strong> used against the adversary<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Even in normal times, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.girlsnotbrides.org\/region\/south-asia\/\"><span style=\"color: #0066cc\">arranged marriages for adolescent girls is widely prevalent in South Asia <\/span><\/a>used as a means to <strong>protect them against \u2018sexual dishonour\u2019<\/strong>, but families experiencing distress (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.hrw.org\/report\/2015\/06\/09\/marry-your-house-swept-away\/child-marriage-bangladesh\"><span style=\"color: #0066cc\">particularly due to natural disasters<\/span><\/a>) are even more prone to marry off young daughters to <strong>reduce their economic burden<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018Therefore, the Rohingya children who have recently arrived in Bangladesh, even those accompanied by their families, <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-myanmar-rohingya-women\/over-half-of-rohingya-girls-who-fled-violence-became-child-brides-u-n-survey-idUSKBN1801J0\"><span style=\"color: #0066cc\">face a high risk of early marriage<\/span><\/a><\/strong>. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gdi.manchester.ac.uk\/research\/publications\/gdi-working-papers\/2017-016\/\"><span style=\"color: #0066cc\">Recent research<\/span><\/a> has documented that it has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.project-syndicate.org\/commentary\/blueprint-to-end-child-marriage-by-sajeda-amin-et-al-2017-03?barrier=accessreg\"><span style=\"color: #0066cc\">adverse life-changing consequences<\/span><\/a> for the girls who experience it.\u00a0 Ongoing interventions in Bangladesh suggests that a possible solution to minimizing these risk is the creation of safe spaces for adolescent girls within the refugee camps, <strong>providing education and training under the supervision of aid agencies<\/strong>.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>-ENDS-<\/p>\n<p>Article by <span style=\"color: #0066cc\">Dan Worth, University of Kent Press Office<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dr Zaki Wahhaj from the School of Economics discusses the risk that young female Rohingya refugees are at increased risk of forced marriage as a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/2017\/09\/25\/expert-comment-female-rohingya-refugees-at-risk-of-forced-marriage\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37654,"featured_media":1927,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[223908,14,94130,70],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37654"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1076"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1077,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1076\/revisions\/1077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/economics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}