Blog 8: Rohingya refugees' "mail order brides"

Rohingya men have been fleeing their home state of Myanmar to Malaysia in order to seek a safer, more productive life. Ethnic violence in their home has forced 30,000 young men across borders. However, as refugees, their class status is extremely low, even in their new home. Malaysian fathers are unwilling to allow their daughters to marry the young Rohingya. The culture has given the men dreams of marrying and having a family, so they are resorting to different means to achieve that. Young women are being smuggled into Malaysia from old home villages with fake passports and no idea of where they are heading.

Brokers are hired to find the “right” woman for each man, and paid to get her false papers. A new industry of human trafficking is being born, even though the intentions of most men are simply to have a life-long companion. Sea travel is dangerous; women sometimes drown in the choppy waters because their boats are too small. Malaysian officials often refuse to allow the ships to dock, forcing the travelers back out to sea with the danger of dehydration and getting lost. Air travel is now the preferred method to smuggle women into the country, and is becoming cheaper.

This instance is a part of a growing issue of how easy it is to buy/sell people. I’ve written on the rent-a-womb industry in India, which is beginning to become a billion dollar industry. This story is related because it reinforces the horrible trend that people are treating women as property. Even in this modern day and age arranged marriages are common place. It is a breach of human rights to neglect any one’s autonomy, and this is definitely an extreme case. Women being shipped off to Malaysia are ignorant not only to the new country, but to the type of man they are to be paired with. Not knowing the woman, and having bought her like an object, derivatizes her and makes her easier to exploit/abuse. Then we see a cycle of mistreatment all stemming from the class gap in Malaysia. If there was not such a huge stigma about marry a refugee, there would not be a need for mail-order brides, and thus abuses would be lower all around.

Dylan Reddish
3/20/13 12:20pm
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/03/201331291132937760.html