Rohingya Women and the Shadow Markets of Protection: A Study of Gendered Vulnerability in South and Southeast Asia

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Drawing on secondary data from humanitarian reports, academic literature, and media sources, the paper introduces the concept of “shadow markets of protection”, patriarchal and often exploitative networks that offer temporary safety and social legitimacy through marriage, frequently at the expense of women’s autonomy, bodily integrity, and future opportunities. These marriages are not simply traditional or cultural phenomena but rather strategic responses to the structural violence of statelessness, institutional neglect, and gender-based discrimination. In contexts where state protection is absent and humanitarian aid is fragmented, such unions become tools of survival and social navigation. The paper examines how gendered precarity intersects with displacement, legal invisibility, poverty, and patriarchal brokerage to produce specific forms of harm that disproportionately affect Rohingya women and girls. By comparing the legal, social, and economic frameworks across the three host countries, the study underscores the urgent need for coherent regional policies and gender-sensitive interventions that confront the structural drivers of forced marriage in refugee settings. Rohingya women Forced marriage Statelessness Gender-based violence Refugee governance Shadow markets Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 1. Introduction The plight of the Rohingya, one of the most persecuted and stateless communities in the world, has generated significant international concern over the last decade. Fleeing systemic violence, ethnic cleansing, and discrimination in Myanmar, over one million Rohingya have sought refuge in neighbouring South Asian countries such as Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia (Southeast Asia). Among them, Rohingya women and girls remain the most vulnerable, often subjected to gender-based violence, forced marriages, and other forms of exploitation as they navigate life in exile without legal recognition, social safety, or institutional protection (UNHCR, 2021 ). The gendered dimensions of displacement have been historically under-addressed in refugee studies, particularly in the context of stateless populations. Rohingya women’s vulnerability is not only a result of displacement but is also shaped by structural inequalities embedded in host countries’ legal frameworks and social norms. In refugee camps and urban slums, forced marriage has emerged as a survival strategy a form of “protection” arranged by families, brokers, or community elders under coercive and exploitative conditions. This phenomenon constitutes what may be described as a “shadow market of protection,” a system of informal, patriarchal arrangements that offer temporary security through marriage but at the cost of bodily autonomy, emotional safety, and human rights. The concept of “protection” in international refugee discourse is typically associated with legal asylum, humanitarian aid, or state responsibility. Yet for stateless refugee women, especially those unregistered or living outside official camps, “protection” is mediated through informal, and often exploitative, gendered networks. These shadow markets include not only kinship structures but also religious networks, trafficking rings, and community enforcers who operate beyond the purview of state accountability. In many cases, Rohingya girls are married off at ages as young as 12 or 13, either to avoid the threat of sexual violence, to reduce economic burden, or as a means of migration to a safer location (Human Rights Watch, 2018 ). This study focuses on two South Asian and one Southeast Asian countries likely, Bangladesh (Cox’s Bazar), India (West Bengal and Jammu), and Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur and Penang) to explore how such shadow markets function, and how gendered vulnerability is produced and sustained across borders. Each of these countries hosts a significant number of Rohingya refugees, yet none grants them full legal refugee status under domestic law. This lack of recognition results in what scholars have termed “institutional invisibility” (Bhatia et al., 2022 ), a condition that exacerbates both structural and physical violence against women. In Bangladesh, which hosts nearly one million Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, the lack of livelihood options, camp overcrowding, and restricted mobility have resulted in rising cases of child and forced marriage. According to reports from UN Women and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Rohingya families often perceive early marriage as a protective mechanism against sexual assault or as a way to cope with economic hardship (UN Women, 2020 ). Despite the presence of UNHCR and multiple humanitarian agencies, the legal framework does not provide adequate deterrence or prevention, as refugees remain outside the ambit of Bangladesh’s national legal protections. In India, where approximately 40,000 Rohingya refugees live in informal settlements, their status is even more precarious. India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and provides no uniform legal status to refugees. Reports indicate that many young Rohingya girls are married off to local Muslim men or to members of their own community as a means to gain informal residency or community acceptance (Chakma, 2021 ). These marriages, however, often lack legal registration, leaving women with no recourse in cases of abuse or abandonment. Additionally, the political climate in India has grown increasingly hostile toward Rohingya communities, further driving them into secrecy and dependence on informal survival networks (Ali, 2020 ). Malaysia, while geographically outside South Asia but socio-politically integrated into the Rohingya migratory network, presents another complex layer. Although Malaysia hosts over 100,000 Rohingya refugees, it does not recognise them as such under domestic law. As a result, Rohingya women live in constant fear of arrest, deportation, or abuse, especially when unregistered by the UNHCR. In the absence of legal safeguards, forced marriage becomes an informal mechanism of “legal protection” through male guardianship, which in turn exposes women to domestic violence and economic exploitation (Fortify Rights, 2019 ). Religious leaders and community heads often serve as informal brokers of these marriages, reinforcing patriarchal norms under the guise of Islamic custom. This paper argues that forced marriage among Rohingya refugee women is not merely a cultural practice, but a consequence of legal statelessness, patriarchal control, and state neglect. It builds on the growing body of feminist refugee studies, which critiques the gender-blindness of traditional asylum frameworks and calls for a more intersectional approach to refugee protection (Pittaway & Bartolomei, 2001 ). The paper introduces the term “shadow markets of protection” to describe the gendered and informal systems through which stateless women are coerced into exploitative relationships under the guise of safety. Methodologically, the study draws from secondary sources including UN agency reports, academic research, investigative journalism, and NGO publications. It does not aim to generalise but to unpack the complex interplay between statelessness, gender, and informal systems of control in shaping refugee women’s lives in South Asia. By offering a comparative regional analysis of forced marriages among Rohingya women, this paper contributes to the growing literature on gendered displacement, statelessness, and informal protection economies. It also urges regional stakeholders and international agencies to move beyond the rhetoric of humanitarianism and address the socio-legal structures that normalise coercion in the name of protection. 2. Materials and Methods This study employs a qualitative, feminist-informed methodology to investigate the dynamics of forced marriage and gendered vulnerability experienced by Rohingya women across Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia. Given the restricted access to field sites and the political sensitivity surrounding refugee populations in these regions, the research is grounded in secondary data analysis. This includes triangulation of humanitarian reports, NGO publications, academic literature, and media investigations. The approach aims to uncover how informal and extralegal systems what this paper terms “shadow markets of protection” emerge in the absence of legal safeguards and reproduce patriarchal forms of control over displaced women’s lives. The following sub-sections outline the data sources used, country selection criteria, and limitations of the research design. 2.1 Research Design and Rationale The research is structured as a comparative case study across three key South Asian refugee-hosting contexts: Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia. Each country presents a unique political, legal, and socio-cultural environment that informs the mechanisms through which informal protection and forced marriage manifest. The selection of these countries is purposeful and theory-driven. Bangladesh, as the largest host country for Rohingya refugees, offers insight into camp-based vulnerability. India represents a case of political hostility and informal urban encampments. Malaysia, while outside the formal South Asian region, is included due to its geographic proximity and status as a critical node in the regional Rohingya migration network (Cheung, 2012 ). This regional comparison allows the research to trace common patterns such as gendered statelessness, patriarchal control, and structural invisibility while also attending to country-specific variations in law, policy, and refugee community dynamics. 2.2 Data Sources Data were drawn from three categories of sources like, UN and International Organisation Reports which includes publications by UNHCR, IOM, UNICEF, and UN Women that provide both statistical data and qualitative assessments of gender-based violence, child marriage, and legal status among Rohingya refugees. Notable among these are the Gender Assessment of the Rohingya Refugee Response (UN Women, 2020 ) and the IOM Protection Snapshot Reports (IOM, 2021). NGO and Advocacy Group Reports: Reports from Fortify Rights, Refugees International, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other civil society actors were used to uncover on-the-ground realities not always captured by UN agencies. These sources often include first-person testimonies, interviews, and rapid assessments, particularly in areas where formal access is restricted. Academic Literature and Theoretical Texts, Peer-reviewed journal articles and edited volumes from refugee studies, gender studies, and South Asian legal scholarship provided the theoretical basis for key concepts such as “shadow markets of protection,” gendered precarity, and informal governance. To ensure the reliability of secondary data, only publications dated between 2017 and 2024 were included, as this period reflects the most significant and well-documented phase of Rohingya displacement following the 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar. 2.3 Thematic Analysis The primary analytical approach was thematic coding, following Braun and Clarke’s ( 2006 ) model. Key themes were identified inductively based on repeated references across sources, such as: Early/forced marriage Gendered violence Legal invisibility Trafficking and cross-border movement Community-level enforcement Religious legitimisation of marriage practices Themes were then categorised by country context to map both shared and divergent experiences of Rohingya women. The coding process was iterative and reflexive, allowing new sub-themes to emerge during the data synthesis phase. Particular attention was given to intersectional vulnerabilities such as age, legal status, marital status, and family structure to avoid flattening the experiences of Rohingya women into a singular narrative. 2.4 Ethical Considerations Although the research does not involve direct interaction with human subjects, ethical sensitivity remains paramount. Many of the secondary sources included survivor narratives, testimonies, or descriptions of traumatic experiences. These accounts were treated with respect and cited responsibly, without extracting or sensationalising personal trauma. In line with feminist research ethics, the goal is not to speak for Rohingya women but to amplify the structural conditions that shape their constrained choices. In addition, no unverifiable or anecdotal reports from uncredited online sources were included. All data were cross-checked across multiple sources where possible. Due to the politically sensitive nature of refugee presence in countries like India and Malaysia, specific geographic identifiers have been anonymised when necessary, in line with guidelines from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, 2018). 2.5 Limitations This study acknowledges several limitations. First, the absence of primary ethnographic fieldwork means the analysis is mediated through the lens of organisations, journalists, and researchers, which may carry their own biases or gaps. Second, language barriers may have excluded Rohingya-language testimonies or documents not translated into English. Third, the generalisability of findings is context-bound, the experiences of Rohingya women in these three countries may differ substantially from those in other diasporic locations such as Thailand, Saudi Arabia, or Indonesia. Despite these limitations, the study offers a rigorous and comparative exploration of how shadow systems of protection arise and operate in conditions of legal statelessness and gendered exclusion. The strength of the research lies in its capacity to draw links between macro-level legal structures and micro-level survival strategies employed by stateless refugee women in the region. 3. Results This section presents the key findings of the study, organised thematically and geographically across three primary host countries i.e., Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia. Drawing on secondary sources, NGO reports, and comparative legal frameworks, the analysis uncovers how forced marriage among Rohingya women functions both as a coping mechanism and a systemic outcome of prolonged statelessness and institutional neglect. Although the specific manifestations of vulnerability vary by national context, common structural drivers such as the absence of legal refugee status, patriarchal social control, and fragmented humanitarian interventions create parallel conditions in which coerced unions flourish. The results are structured thematically to reflect the multidimensional nature of forced marriage and gendered exploitation among displaced Rohingya women. These forms of vulnerability are shaped by overlapping factors, including legal ambiguity, economic dependency, and patriarchal brokerage, which together constitute what this study terms the “shadow markets of protection.” The findings are organised into various core themes likely, legal precarity and refugee non-recognition are examined in each country, with attention to how legal invisibility indirectly fosters early and coerced marriage. Further, the economics of marriage and the role of informal markets are analysed, showing how dowry systems, religious brokerage, and cross-border trafficking intersect with gender and displacement. Also digital surveillance, online brokerage, and misinformation are explored to understand how technology simultaneously facilitates agency and deepens vulnerability. Finally, the section considers intergenerational outcomes such as stateless births, deprivation of education, and the reproduction of gendered marginality across generations. Within each section, third-level headings provide further specificity by disaggregating findings according to country context, institutional actors, and typologies of harm. These themes not only trace the lived experiences of Rohingya women but also reveal the structural complicity of state and humanitarian actors in the normalisation of forced marriage. The empirical findings expose how informal economies of survival operate in spaces where legal protection is absent and women’s bodies become sites of negotiation for safety, belonging, and identity. Understanding these patterns is essential for developing rights-based interventions that challenge the embedded systems of control within refugee governance and humanitarian frameworks. 3.1 Bangladesh: Cox’s Bazar Camps Since the mass exodus of Rohingya from Myanmar in 2017, Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh has become home to over 960,000 refugees, making it the world’s largest refugee settlement (UNHCR, 2021). While Bangladesh has allowed temporary refuge, it has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, and Rohingya refugees are not recognised under national refugee law. This legal ambiguity severely limits their rights and freedoms, particularly for women and girls, who face heightened gender-based risks within a highly restrictive camp environment. One of the most alarming manifestations of gendered vulnerability in Cox’s Bazar is the rise in early and forced marriages. According to UN Women (2020), child marriage has surged significantly since the refugee influx, with some reports indicating that girls as young as 12 are being married off. The motivations for these marriages are multiple, to reduce household economic burdens, to prevent sexual harassment and assault, and to gain perceived protection through male guardianship. For many refugee families, early marriage is framed as a protective strategy in the absence of formal legal or social safeguards (Human Rights Watch, 2018). Several aid agencies have reported that this surge in child and forced marriages correlates directly with deteriorating camp conditions. Overcrowding, limited access to education, food insecurity, and the prohibition on formal employment contribute to a precarious environment in which women are forced to depend on informal, patriarchal networks of protection (IOM, 2021). These networks often involve community elders, religious leaders, or distant relatives who act as marriage brokers under the guise of safeguarding girls’ honour and futures. Importantly, such marriages are not simply the product of cultural tradition, but rather arise from structural constraints that push Rohingya families to seek informal solutions to very real threats. The lack of gender-sensitive refugee policy and inadequate access to reproductive healthcare further exacerbate these dynamics. According to a joint UNHCR-UNFPA assessment, many girls are married before reaching maturity and face severe health complications due to early pregnancy and childbirth (UNFPA, 2020). In some cases, forced marriages are transacted across national borders, indicating the emergence of a shadow economy of protection. Fortify Rights (2019) documented instances in which Rohingya girls were trafficked or married to men in neighbouring regions, including India and Malaysia, under the pretext of security or economic opportunity. While some of these marriages are arranged consensually by families seeking a better life for their daughters, others involve deception, coercion, or financial exploitation. This practice aligns with what scholars describe as “survival marriages,” a term used to capture the transactional and protective logic embedded in such unions (Bhatia et al., 2022). Religious institutions also play a complicated role in these arrangements. Many marriages in Cox’s Bazar are officiated by local imams without legal documentation, making it virtually impossible for girls to seek legal recourse in cases of abuse or abandonment. While Islamic leaders in the camps often claim to uphold moral values and community protection, in practice, religious authority frequently reinforces patriarchal control over Rohingya women’s lives (Farzana, 2019). Furthermore, interviews and rapid assessments conducted by the Women’s Refugee Commission (2021) highlight how aid dependency deepens gendered power imbalances. As humanitarian resources become scarcer, families may be incentivised directly or indirectly to “exchange” their daughters for marriage in return for food, housing, or debt repayment. In this sense, forced marriage becomes embedded in the economy of displacement, wherein women’s bodies serve as units of negotiation and survival. Community-based organisations operating in the camps face challenges in addressing this issue. Legal aid services are underdeveloped, and cultural taboos often prevent survivors from speaking out. Moreover, Bangladesh’s own domestic law prohibits marriage before the age of 18 but lacks enforcement in refugee contexts due to jurisdictional ambiguities. As a result, many marriages are simultaneously illegal, unrecorded, and unmonitored, leaving Rohingya women trapped in exploitative domestic arrangements without legal or social protection (Rahman, 2020). Another underexplored aspect is the emotional toll of forced marriage. Testimonies collected by UN agencies reveal that girls often suffer from depression, isolation, and trauma, especially after childbirth. The psychological burden is compounded by the absence of mental health services and the expectation that women will remain silent to preserve family honour (UN Women, 2020). These social silences further entrench a system where marriage becomes not just a private contract but a political mechanism of control and containment. Despite multiple humanitarian interventions aimed at “mainstreaming gender” in camp responses, the core drivers of forced marriage, statelessness, poverty, and patriarchal authority remain unaddressed. This gap highlights a fundamental contradiction in refugee governance: while international actors recognise gender-based violence as a protection concern, they often fail to tackle the structural environments that normalise and perpetuate it (Freedman, 2016). In summary, the situation in Cox’s Bazar reveals how gendered vulnerability among Rohingya women is shaped by legal invisibility, economic desperation, and cultural control mechanisms. Forced marriage here operates not just as a cultural artefact, but as an institutionalised response to systemic abandonment. These marriages form part of a broader “shadow market of protection,” where informal actors step in to regulate women’s lives in the absence of state or international accountability. This dynamic underscores the need for refugee policies that move beyond surface-level gender programming and address the material, legal, and political conditions that make forced marriage appear like a viable or even necessary option. 3.2 India: Informal Settlements and Border Marriages India hosts an estimated 40,000 Rohingya refugees, most of whom live in informal settlements scattered across the National Capital Region, Jammu, Hyderabad, and the border districts of West Bengal and Assam (UNHCR, 2022). India is neither a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention nor its 1967 Protocol and has no domestic asylum law. As a result, Rohingya reside on short‑term “long‑stay” or “leave‑to‑remain” visas or without documentation at all making them deportable at any time under the Foreigners Act (1946) (Ali, 2020). This legal precarity fuels gender‑specific harms: women and girls become reliant on patriarchal or criminal intermediaries who promise “protection” through marriage, often under coercive conditions. 3.2.1 Drivers of Forced and “Identity” Marriages: A key incentive for cross‑community marriages in India is informal identity assimilation. Marriage to an Indian Muslim man can provide limited social legitimacy, reduce the risk of police raids, and facilitate access to ration cards or Aadhaar numbers (Chakma, 2021). Recent field reports from the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN, 2023) document families in the border town of Basirhat who marry adolescent daughters, some as young as fourteen, to distant cousins or local men for ₹30,000–₹50,000- an amount that covers smugglers’ fees incurred during the Teknaf‑Petrapole border crossing. While the transactions take place in daylight, the contracts remain unregistered, leaving women without legal recourse should abuse occur. 3.2.2 Role of Religious and Community Brokers: Rohingya settlements in Jammu and West Bengal host makeshift madrasas that have become nodes for match‑making. Imams or community elders arrange marriages under nikah ceremonies performed in Urdu or Rohingya dialect, bypassing state registration (Farzana, 2019). These brokers legitimize early unions as safeguards against sexual assault and communal hostility, particularly after episodes of anti‑Rohingya rhetoric following the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (HRW, 2022). In reality, marriage often transfers risk rather than alleviating it: reports show a rise in domestic violence cases, but women hesitate to approach Indian courts for fear of deportation (HRLN, 2023). 3.2.3 Intersection with Trafficking Networks: Forced marriages are frequently enmeshed with inter‑state trafficking routes extending from Cox’s Bazar through Kolkata to Delhi. NGOs such as Shakti Vahini have recorded cases where marriage was used as a cover for labour exploitation in Delhi’s informal garment sector or for sex work along the Jaipur-Ajmer corridor (Shakti Vahini, 2022). Survivors describe being promised stable spousal arrangements only to discover they were sold multiple times before reaching their purported “husbands” (Bhatia et al., 2022). These patterns underscore how shadow markets of protection are inseparable from profit‑making logics in India’s broader trafficking economy. 3.2.4 State Responses and Protection Gaps: Although India’s Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 criminalises child marriage and trafficking, enforcement within refugee settlements is rare due to jurisdictional ambiguity and a lack of refugee‑specific guidelines for local police (Kaur, 2021). Sporadic crackdowns such as the 2017 and 2021 mass detentions in Jammu have had unintended gendered consequences: families accelerate marriages to shield girls from arrest and family separation (UNHCR, 2022). Community‑based women’s groups, supported by Médecins Sans Frontières and HRLN, offer paralegal aid and psychosocial support; however, their reach is limited and funding uncertain (MSF, 2023). 3.2.5 Everyday Impacts on Rohingya Women: Qualitative interviews collected by Refugees International (2022) reveal high levels of anxiety, isolation, and distrust among Rohingya women in Delhi’s Kalindi Kunj settlement. Many reported forgoing antenatal care for fear that hospital staff would alert immigration authorities. Those in forced marriages often experience a double bind: leaving an abusive husband risks detention; staying perpetuates violence. Without legal work authorisation, women rely on informal home‑based piecework, earning as little as ₹80 (US $1) per day, further entrenching economic dependence on spouses or in‑laws (Kaur, 2021). 3.2.6 Implications for the Shadow‑Market Thesis: The Indian case illustrates how forced marriage functions as both a coping strategy and a social technology that redistributes the costs of state exclusion onto women’s bodies. Unlike Bangladesh’s camp‑based survival marriages, Indian settlements reveal a pattern of “identity marriages,” in which legal invisibility is mitigated through conjugal ties with citizens who can confer a veneer of legitimacy. Yet this veneer is fragile: it substitutes one form of insecurity (immigration raids) with another (domestic exploitation). Consequently, the shadow market in India is characterised less by overt brokerage fees and more by ambiguous exchanges of legal shelter for reproductive and domestic labour. 3.3 Malaysia: Urban Statelessness and Gendered Exploitation Although Malaysia lies outside the South Asian subcontinent, it remains deeply integrated into the regional Rohingya migration network. As of 2023, over 104,000 registered Rohingya refugees live in Malaysia, mostly in urban peripheries of Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Johor Bahru (UNHCR, 2023). This number excludes tens of thousands of unregistered individuals, many of whom entered via informal maritime routes or secondary migration from Bangladesh and Myanmar. Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, and refugees are treated as undocumented migrants under immigration law, rendering them vulnerable to arrest, detention, and deportation (SUHAKAM, 2022). For Rohingya women, these conditions manifest in specific patterns of forced and survival marriages, mediated by religious figures, community brokers, and sometimes employers. Unlike in Bangladesh or India, where camp-based or border settlements structure community life, Malaysia’s Rohingya population is highly dispersed, making it harder for humanitarian actors to monitor gender-based abuses. In this fragmented and surveillance-heavy context, forced marriages function as a form of informal legal protection: a means of acquiring a male guardian, securing shelter, or avoiding immigration raids (Fortify Rights, 2019). 3.3.1 “Nikah as Protection”: The Role of Religious Institutions: Marriage under Islamic rites (nikah) is frequently deployed in urban Rohingya communities as a mechanism of survival. Local imams and ustaz often officiate marriages without requiring documentation or minimum age proof. According to a field report by the Malaysian Human Rights Commission (SUHAKAM, 2022), some Rohingya girls are married as early as age 13, with community elders justifying the practice as both a religious duty and a protective necessity. These marriages are typically not registered with the Malaysian Islamic authorities (Jabatan Agama Islam), rendering them invisible to the legal system and difficult to challenge in cases of abuse. Such religious legitimisation also contributes to social silencing: women who attempt to leave abusive marriages are shamed for violating sharia-based marital norms, regardless of whether they consented to the union. With little access to shelters, legal aid, or women’s organisations, many Rohingya women remain trapped in exploitative relationships under the guise of religious obligation (Bhatia et al., 2022). 3.3.2 The Intersection of Labour and Marriage Exploitation: In Malaysia’s informal labour market particularly in construction, domestic work, and food services marriage is sometimes offered by employers or brokers as part of a “work-for-shelter” arrangement. Interviews by Refugees International (2022) and Tenaganita (2021) have uncovered cases in which young Rohingya women were promised housing and protection but were instead coerced into sexual and domestic servitude, under the pretext of being wives. These women, lacking legal refugee status or language proficiency, are often unaware of their rights and fear reporting to authorities due to the risk of detention under Malaysia’s Immigration Act (1959/63). Some cases involve deceptive transnational marriages, in which women are brought from Cox’s Bazar or Yangon by traffickers and married off to undocumented Rohingya men already residing in Malaysia. While framed as consensual family reunification, these arrangements frequently serve as entry points into cycles of abuse, debt bondage, and sexual coercion (Tenaganita, 2021). 3.3.3 Gendered Violence in the Absence of Legal Status: The vulnerability of Rohingya women in Malaysia is further compounded by the absence of legal recourse. Although Malaysia has some domestic legislation addressing gender-based violence such as the Domestic Violence Act 1994 these laws do not apply to stateless refugees unless they are formally documented. Even then, accessing support services is hampered by language barriers, institutional distrust, and fear of police (SUHAKAM, 2022). According to a 2020 UNHCR protection monitoring report, more than 70% of reported gender-based violence cases went uninvestigated, largely due to the survivors’ undocumented status and the informal nature of their marriages. Community-level dispute resolution is often the only recourse, but these informal forums are dominated by male elders and religious authorities who prioritise family honour and social cohesion over women’s safety. In some instances, victims are forced to reconcile with abusive spouses or return to exploitative homes under threat of community excommunication (Fortify Rights, 2019). 3.3.4 Everyday Insecurity and Coping Mechanisms: For Rohingya women in Malaysia, daily life is marked by invisibility and precarity. They cannot legally work, own property, or access public healthcare, and are often confined to domestic spaces to avoid police harassment. This immobility limits their social networks and increases their dependence on spouses, relatives, or employers who may exploit them. Some women attempt to resist these constraints by forming women-led mutual aid groups, often in partnership with local mosques or civil society organisations. These groups offer informal counselling, childcare support, and literacy programmes, though they remain small in scale and chronically underfunded (Tenaganita, 2021). Digital networks have also emerged as a space for solidarity: WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages allow Rohingya women to discreetly share information about shelters, job opportunities, and health clinics though digital surveillance and misinformation pose new risks (UNHCR, 2023). 3.3.5 Shadow Markets and the Reproduction of Statelessness: Malaysia’s case reveals how forced marriage is not just a response to statelessness but also a mechanism that reproduces it. Children born of unregistered unions are often left without any documentation, continuing the intergenerational cycle of statelessness. In some cases, Malaysian authorities detain these children as “illegal immigrants,” despite their birth on Malaysian soil (SUHAKAM, 2022). The lack of birth registration also means that girls born into these unions are later at higher risk of being married off themselves, perpetuating the same vulnerabilities their mothers faced. Marriage, therefore, becomes part of a shadow system of governance, wherein community, religion, and market forces operate in the absence of legal protection. In this informal state of exception, women’s bodies are the primary terrain of negotiation and survival bartered, protected, violated, and silenced in turn. As in Bangladesh and India, Rohingya women in Malaysia face gendered exploitation not simply because of cultural traditions but because of state policy failures and international indifference. Table 1. Comparative Indicators of Forced Marriage and Gendered Vulnerability among Rohingya Women in India, Bangladesh and Malaysia Sources : Human Rights Watch (2018, 2023); UNHCR (2023, 2024); Tenaganita (2021); Refugees International (2023); Fortify Rights (2022); Rohingya Women Development Network (2023); Amnesty International (2022); Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (2022); Statelessness Network Asia Pacific (2023); The Wire (2023). Table 1, presents a comparative overview of legal frameworks, social conditions, and informal practices affecting Rohingya women in three Asian countries namely- India, Bangladesh and Malaysia. Key indicators include refugee status, marriage registration, child marriage prevalence, access to education and livelihoods, and the role of religious and community brokers. The table highlights both the diversity of national contexts and the shared structural barriers that sustain forced marriage and gendered precarity. 4. Discussion A comparative analysis of Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia reveals significant overlaps in the experiences of Rohingya women facing forced marriage, despite differing national policies and refugee governance frameworks. Across these three countries, the core drivers of such marriages remain consistent: legal invisibility, economic desperation, and patriarchal brokerage. Legal invisibility manifests in all three contexts, where Rohingya refugees lack recognised legal status under domestic or international refugee law. Economic desperation, shaped by restrictions on formal employment and access to services, compels families to seek security through marriage. Patriarchal brokers whether religious leaders, community elders, or employers step in as informal authorities regulating women’s lives in the absence of state protection. Despite these shared dynamics, the modalities of forced marriage differ by context. In Bangladesh, particularly in the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, marriage emerges as a camp-based coping mechanism. Families marry off young girls to reduce household size, guard against sexual violence, or secure rations and perceived protection. In India, marriage is deployed as a strategy for informal legal assimilation. Known as “identity marriages,” these unions provide Rohingya women with symbolic protection through conjugal ties to Indian Muslim men, offering a semblance of legal and social legitimacy. Meanwhile, in Malaysia, the urban dispersal of refugees creates a different dynamic here, forced marriages intersect with labour exploitation. Women are coerced into domestic or sexual servitude under the guise of marriage, often facilitated by employers or religious brokers. These distinctions demonstrate how local political economies shape the contours of gendered vulnerability, even as the consequences for women subjugation, violence, and statelessness remain consistent. To explain these patterns more conceptually, this paper uses the term “shadow markets of protection” to describe the informal systems that arise when state institutions fail to provide legal safeguards. Drawing on theories of the informal economy and feminist critiques of refugee governance, shadow markets are defined as extra-legal mechanisms through which protection is bought, sold, or bartered often through women’s bodies. These systems include kin-based exchanges, unregulated religious marriages, and commercial transactions that resemble trafficking. While they offer a semblance of security, they also institutionalise patriarchal control, functioning as para-institutions that discipline women and redistribute state responsibility to informal actors. In this sense, they represent a form of governance from below, where survival is organised not by law but by cultural authority and market incentives. Despite extensive humanitarian interventions, policy responses across the region remain inadequate. One major gap is the over-reliance on age-focused awareness campaigns against child marriage, which fail to address the structural drivers legal exclusion and lack of livelihood options that lead families to see marriage as a form of protection. Another issue is the compartmentalisation of services: gender-based violence programmes are often disconnected from legal aid or economic empowerment initiatives, limiting their effectiveness. Finally, the emphasis on border security over human security evident in Bangladesh’s fenced camps, India’s detention drives, and Malaysia’s immigration raids elevates the market value of marriage as a mobility or survival mechanism. These policies inadvertently increase women’s vulnerability by making forced marriage appear as the least risky of limited options. Table 2. Multi-Level Recommendations to Address Forced Marriage and Gendered Vulnerability among Rohingya Women in South Asia Sources : UNHCR (2023, 2024); Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (2022); Rohingya Women Development Network (2023); Refugees International (2023); Tenaganita (2021); Fortify Rights (2022); ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (2023); SAARC Secretariat (2022); Statelessness Network Asia Pacific (2023); Women’s Refugee Commission (2023). Table 2, outlines actionable recommendations across legal, religious, regional, and humanitarian domains. Each intervention targets a specific level of governance and is linked to a rationale rooted in field-based evidence. Together, these strategies aim to disrupt the informal systems what this paper terms “shadow markets of protection” that enable forced marriage and systemic exploitation of Rohingya women. Implementing these recommendations would require political will but is feasible. Evidence from other displacement contexts such as Afghan refugees in Iran demonstrates that limited regularisation and gender-sensitive programming can reduce exploitation without leading to destabilising migration flows. Host states must move beyond emergency responses and adopt long-term, inclusive policies that uphold human rights and gender justice. It is important to acknowledge this study’s limitations. The reliance on secondary data, while necessary due to access constraints, may underrepresent hidden or unreported cases of forced marriage. Furthermore, the absence of direct testimonies from Rohingya women due to language barriers limits the depth of individual narratives. Future research should adopt participatory methods, including digital ethnography and longitudinal studies, to better capture the evolving experiences of Rohingya women in displacement. The practice of forced marriage among Rohingya refugee women across South and Southeast Asia is not simply a relic of cultural tradition. Rather, it is a structural outcome of statelessness, institutional abandonment, and patriarchal brokerage. These marriages are deeply embedded in shadow markets of protection that convert gendered insecurity into social currency. Combating this crisis requires addressing the root causes legal exclusion, economic dependence, and patriarchal control rather than relying solely on moral appeals or symbolic interventions. Until these underlying issues are resolved, Rohingya women will continue to face a cruel paradox, they must choose between the violence of exclusion and the coercion of protection. 4.1 Digital Surveillance and Online Vulnerability As Rohingya women navigate their displacement across Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia, digital platforms have emerged as both tools of survival and instruments of control. In all three contexts, women increasingly rely on messaging services like WhatsApp and social media platforms such as Facebook to coordinate migration routes, arrange marriages, or seek solidarity through informal support networks. However, this digital turn is not without peril. Reports from Refugees International (2022) and Tenaganita (2021) show how traffickers and fraudulent marriage brokers use online platforms to target vulnerable women under the guise of proposing legitimate unions. In Bangladesh’s camps, online matchmaking services—some operated from cyber cafés near the camps have facilitated the coerced movement of girls into rural Bangladeshi households, where their digital traces disappear. In Malaysia and India, authorities have monitored online Rohingya activity as part of broader surveillance efforts targeting undocumented populations. Women who post photos, complaints, or calls for help risk being located or punished either by state actors or conservative male relatives. One 2021 case documented by SUHAKAM involved a Rohingya girl in Selayang who was forcibly married off after being accused of bringing dishonour to the family through her Instagram posts. Meanwhile, misinformation shared via WhatsApp groups such as fake news about UNHCR resettlement or marriage-linked benefits has created false hopes and facilitated exploitative arrangements. Thus, while digital spaces offer connection and information, they also extend the reach of coercion and control, particularly in environments where women’s mobility and agency are already constrained. Shadow markets of protection have adapted to the digital age, embedding themselves within virtual spaces that offer neither oversight nor accountability. 4.2 Intergenerational Impacts and Stateless Childhoods The long-term implications of forced marriage extend well beyond the immediate harm suffered by Rohingya women. Across the region, children born of unregistered or coercive marriages often inherit their parents’ statelessness, compounding the cycle of legal exclusion. In Bangladesh, the government’s refusal to recognise camp births as legitimate leaves thousands of children without birth certificates, a reality that forecloses access to formal education, healthcare, or future citizenship (UNICEF, 2021). Similar patterns are observed in India, where children of Rohingya mothers and Indian fathers are frequently denied school admission due to lack of documentation even when the father holds local identity papers (HRLN, 2023). In Malaysia, undocumented children face periodic immigration crackdowns and are sometimes detained alongside their parents in overcrowded facilities, despite international prohibitions against child detention (SUHAKAM, 2022). These intergenerational consequences are profoundly gendered. Daughters of forced unions are at high risk of early marriage themselves, especially in households where patriarchal norms go unchallenged and economic hardship persists. In India’s Rohingya settlements, activists from Shakti Vahini have reported cases where girls as young as twelve are withdrawn from informal learning centres to be married off, often in return for modest dowries that cover household expenses. Boys, on the other hand, are frequently pulled into informal labour markets collecting scrap, working in construction, or selling street food further entrenching economic precarity and family dependence on child labour. Beyond material deprivation, these children also suffer psychological harms. Without legal identities or secure homes, many internalise a sense of marginalisation, fear, and distrust. Mental health assessments by Médecins Sans Frontières (2023) in both Bangladesh and India suggest that children of forced marriages are more likely to exhibit symptoms of depression, anxiety, and aggression. Their futures, shaped by statelessness and familial coercion, represent the reproduction of vulnerability in its most structural form. Addressing forced marriage, then, is not only a matter of women’s rights but a prerequisite for safeguarding the next generation of Rohingya refugees from perpetual marginalisation. 4.3 Masculinities and Marriage Brokerage: The Role of Rohingya Men While the experiences of Rohingya women remain central to this study, it is equally important to interrogate the role of Rohingya men fathers, brothers, husbands, and community brokers in sustaining the system of forced and strategic marriages. Across Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia, patriarchal gender norms not only shape women’s vulnerabilities but also define male identities in ways that incentivise control over female kin. In Cox’s Bazar, for example, fathers often marry off daughters early to reduce the number of dependents in the household or to reinforce social status within the camp. In many cases, these decisions are made by male elders through informal shura (consultative) processes that leave women and girls voiceless (UN Women, 2020). Masculinity in displacement is often expressed through the protection and control of female relatives. Disempowered by their own lack of legal status and economic opportunity, many Rohingya men seek to reclaim authority by arranging marriages, a practice that is framed as a fulfilment of religious obligation and community duty. In India, the status of men is enhanced when they are seen as the “husband” of a vulnerable woman particularly if she is younger or undocumented as this not only grants symbolic power but can also be a pathway to local legitimacy through marital assimilation. In Malaysia, some male refugees have taken on brokerage roles, profiting from arranging marriages for newly arrived women or girls from Bangladesh or Myanmar. These actors often operate with impunity, hidden behind religious or community-based justifications for their actions (Tenaganita, 2021). However, not all Rohingya men are complicit. In several documented cases, young men have resisted coerced marriages, especially when pressured into marrying much younger girls or to women trafficked from other locations. Humanitarian organisations have also reported a rise in male allies advocating against child marriage within the camps and urban settlements, particularly those with access to education or informal employment. This ambivalence underscores the need to move beyond binary framings of “perpetrator and victim” and instead engage with the ways in which masculinity itself is reshaped under the pressures of displacement, statelessness, and cultural loss. 4.4 Humanitarian Complicity and Institutional Gaps While humanitarian actors are often seen as bulwarks against gender-based violence in refugee settings, their interventions can sometimes reinforce the very structures they seek to dismantle. Across Rohingya communities in South Asia, there is growing evidence that NGOs, UN agencies, and community-based organisations, though well-intentioned, have inadvertently sustained the informal systems that facilitate forced marriage. For instance, food and cash distributions are often tied to male-headed households, reinforcing patriarchal norms and enabling male guardians to wield disproportionate power over female dependents (Bhatia et al., 2022). In Cox’s Bazar, families with more women, particularly unmarried daughters are perceived to be at higher risk of exclusion unless affiliated with a recognised household structure, thus creating material incentives for early or coerced marriages. Marriage registration remains another blind spot in humanitarian programming. In Malaysia and India, forced marriages are often unregistered and conducted informally through religious authorities or brokers. Humanitarian agencies rarely intervene in these arrangements, either due to lack of jurisdiction or out of cultural sensitivity. This institutional hesitation to challenge religious norms results in the tacit approval of underage and exploitative unions. Legal aid and protection services are similarly fragmented: gender-based violence units operate independently from refugee legal documentation centres, making it difficult to pursue justice for women who experience marital abuse or trafficking under the cover of marriage (WRC, 2021). Moreover, humanitarian actors often depend on community leaders including religious figures and male elders for information dissemination and programme implementation. These same actors are sometimes directly involved in marriage arrangements, thereby creating a conflict of interest that is rarely acknowledged. When efforts are made to resist child marriage, they are typically directed at girls through awareness workshops and vocational training, without sufficiently engaging male decision-makers or challenging structural barriers such as poverty, food insecurity, and legal exclusion. The complicity of humanitarian institutions is not the result of malice but of operational constraints, cultural caution, and fragmented mandates. Nonetheless, their actions or inactions can normalise harmful practices by failing to address the power asymmetries that define Rohingya marriage markets. If shadow markets of protection are to be dismantled, humanitarian systems must move toward intersectional, rights-based, and gender-transformative approaches that hold all actors including themselves accountable. 5. Conclusion The phenomenon of forced marriage among Rohingya refugee women across South and Southeast Asia cannot be understood in isolation from the structural conditions of statelessness, legal exclusion, economic precarity, and patriarchal governance. This study has illustrated how the absence of formal refugee protections in Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia has created fertile ground for the emergence of shadow markets of protection informal, extra-legal systems that offer survival in exchange for women’s bodily autonomy. Within these shadow markets, marriage becomes more than a cultural or religious institution; it functions as a transactional mechanism for mobility, shelter, respectability, and sometimes even rations. The comparative analysis of these three countries reveals that although the modalities of forced marriage vary from dowry-driven exchanges in Bangladesh to assimilation strategies in India and exploitative labour-conjugal arrangements in Malaysia, the consequences are alarmingly similar curtailed freedom, cycles of violence, and multigenerational statelessness. In each setting, the institution of marriage is weaponised to manage displacement, discipline femininity, and consolidate patriarchal control in the absence of legal norms and rights-based frameworks. Moreover, this paper challenges the tendency to frame forced marriage solely as a “women’s issue.” The complicity and participation of Rohingya men whether as fathers seeking security, brokers profiting from despair, or young husbands caught in their own webs of coercion show that masculinity is both a site of power and vulnerability. Understanding how patriarchal expectations drive men to assert control or conform to social pressure is essential for building comprehensive interventions. The humanitarian sector, too, is not outside the dynamics it seeks to reform. Aid delivery mechanisms that centre male-headed households, avoid confronting religious authorities, or fragment legal and gender-based services inadvertently reproduce the very systems that facilitate exploitation. Without actively interrogating their own operational norms and engagement models, humanitarian actors risk becoming silent partners in the perpetuation of gender-based harm. This study also underscores that forced marriage is not a discrete or one-time event it is an intergenerational phenomenon. Children born from such unions often inherit the statelessness and marginalisation of their mothers, repeating the cycle of invisibility, exploitation, and vulnerability. The risks are especially acute for girls, who are likely to be married off early, and for boys, who are thrust into labour markets with no protections or educational prospects. To break this cycle, regional actors must adopt a multi-pronged, gender-transformative approach to refugee governance. Legal recognition of refugee status, access to livelihoods, and gender-sensitive social protection must be placed at the centre of policy responses. States must also move beyond security-centric frameworks that criminalise displacement and instead prioritise dignity, agency, and inclusion. At the same time, the international community must hold host governments and humanitarian agencies accountable for gender-based rights violations occurring under their watch. Ultimately, what this study reveals is that the violence Rohingya women face through forced marriage is not simply a matter of cultural tradition or individual abuse. It is a form of structural and systemic violence, a mechanism through which statelessness, displacement, and patriarchy converge to police, commodify, and control women’s lives. Without meaningful legal reform, sustained advocacy, and regional cooperation, these shadow markets of protection will continue to flourish in the gaps left by formal institutions. And until those gaps are filled with justice, recognition, and rights, the cost will be borne again and again by the bodies and futures of Rohingya women. Declarations Funding Statement This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Clinical Trial Number Not applicable. This study does not involve any clinical trial or medical intervention. Ethical Approval / Informed Consent As this study is based entirely on publicly available secondary sources (e.g., legal documents, NGO reports, and media investigations), no ethical approval or informed consent was required. Author Contribution The Corresponding author (Irshad Khan), was primarily responsible for the conceptual development of the study, drafting the manuscript, and conducting the detailed literature review. He compiled and analysed secondary data from humanitarian reports, news sources, and academic studies to frame the paper's core arguments. Irshad Khan also prepared the visual elements (including tables and figures) and ensured the manuscript adhered to the journal’s style and formatting requirements. He coordinated the submission process and integrated the co-author’s feedback during revisions.Dr. Iftekhar Ahmad Ansari provided overall research supervision and intellectual guidance throughout the paper. He contributed significantly to refining the theoretical framework, strengthening the analytical depth, and reviewing multiple drafts of the manuscript. His critical insights helped shape the interdisciplinary approach and ensured the research maintained scholarly rigour and regional relevance. Dr. Iftekhar Ahmad Ansari also reviewed and approved the final version of the paper for submission. Acknowledgement The authors extend sincere gratitude to the individuals and organisations whose insights, reports, and advocacy efforts have informed the findings of this research. Special thanks to field-based NGOs and community organisations in Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia that have worked tirelessly to document and support Rohingya women survivors of gender-based violence. The contributions of researchers, activists, and legal practitioners whose publicly accessible data and testimonies have made this study possible are deeply appreciated. References Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network. (2022). Displacement in South and Southeast Asia: Regional Trends and Gaps. Bangkok: APRRN. ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. (2023). 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The Wire. (2023). “Inside the Informal Camps: Rohingya Marriages and Statelessness in India.” https://thewire.in UNFPA. (2020). Child marriage and reproductive health in Rohingya refugee camps . https://www.unfpa.org UNHCR. (2021). Global Rohingya emergency update . https://www.unhcr.org UNHCR. (2021). Rohingya emergency overview . https://www.unhcr.org UNHCR. (2022). India fact sheet: Rohingya population overview . https://www.unhcr.org UNHCR. (2023). Malaysia fact sheet: Refugee statistics and protection trends . https://www.unhcr.org UNHCR. (2023). Global Trends in Forced Displacement 2022. Geneva: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. UNHCR. (2024). Malaysia Factsheet: Rohingya Refugees. https://www.unhcr.org/my UN Women. (2020). Gender assessment of the Rohingya refugee response in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh . https://www.unwomen.org Women’s Refugee Commission. (2021). Unseen and unheard: Rohingya women and girls in displacement . https://www.womensrefugeecommission.org Women’s Refugee Commission. (2023). Empowering Displaced Women: From Aid Dependency to Agency. New York: WRC. Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. Cite Share Download PDF Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. As a division of Research Square Company, we’re committed to making research communication faster, fairer, and more useful. We do this by developing innovative software and high quality services for the global research community. Our growing team is made up of researchers and industry professionals working together to solve the most critical problems facing scientific publishing. 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13:56:45","extension":"html","order_by":11,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"acdc-reference","size":133193,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"earlyproof.html","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7183932/v1/a3e381b71cb65aafae696d19.html"},{"id":92183658,"identity":"b5ee93e7-1c20-438c-8c7b-b3ad84cf5c91","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-25 13:56:45","extension":"jpeg","order_by":1,"title":"Figure 1","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":160269,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRohingya mother and child in Cox’s Bazar camp.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSource\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/em\u003e\u003cem\u003e:https://www.unfpa.org/news/midwives-bangladesh-bring-hope-survivors-cyclone-mocha-worlds-largest-refugee-camp\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhotograph taken by UN Women/Allison Joyce in March 2018 at the Kutupalong‑Balukhali Mega‑Camp, Bangladesh. The image shows a young Rohingya woman holding her infant outside a bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelter, illustrating cramped terrain and conditions that underpin this study’s analysis of “shadow markets of protection.”\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"floatimage1.jpeg","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7183932/v1/46389e56d50dd66d532d3363.jpeg"},{"id":92183659,"identity":"4397ef1f-8112-4649-ba09-9c647e4f8e96","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-25 13:56:45","extension":"jpeg","order_by":2,"title":"Figure 2","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":282406,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRohingya women in an informal settlement in India\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSource:\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/em\u003e\u003cem\u003ehttps://www.hrw.org/news/2022/03/31/india-rohingya-deported-myanmar-face-danger?\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003ePhoto captures Rohingya women gathered outside makeshift shelters in an urban settlement near Delhi, reflecting the precarious living conditions and heightened vulnerability that feed into patterns of forced and identity-based marriage in India.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"floatimage2.jpeg","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7183932/v1/0c3628752343c2c07eb19ce3.jpeg"},{"id":92183657,"identity":"f6b8cc88-5e1a-459d-ac04-d966aac1044b","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-25 13:56:45","extension":"jpeg","order_by":3,"title":"Figure 3","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":128056,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRohingya woman in an urban settlement, Malaysia\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSource:\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/em\u003e\u003cem\u003ehttps://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/latest/i-survive-best-i-can-caring-refugee-communities-malaysia?\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eImage by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), documenting life in Malaysian refugee communities. The photograph shows a Rohingya woman in a makeshift dwelling in Kuala Lumpur, highlighting the cramped living conditions and limited privacy that contribute to her vulnerability and dependence on informal arrangements such as marriage-for-protection.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"floatimage3.jpeg","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7183932/v1/2bf3dd2e6b91f525a7fcff25.jpeg"},{"id":96913021,"identity":"03e46b54-358f-4524-9448-63e39eed9f80","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-11-27 13:49:48","extension":"pdf","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":1560849,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"manuscript.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7183932/v1/176030a9-c5aa-422b-bd21-102b8e3d3633.pdf"}],"financialInterests":"No competing interests reported.","formattedTitle":"Rohingya Women and the Shadow Markets of Protection: A Study of Gendered Vulnerability in South and Southeast Asia","fulltext":[{"header":"1. Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003eThe plight of the Rohingya, one of the most persecuted and stateless communities in the world, has generated significant international concern over the last decade. Fleeing systemic violence, ethnic cleansing, and discrimination in Myanmar, over one million Rohingya have sought refuge in neighbouring South Asian countries such as Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia (Southeast Asia). Among them, Rohingya women and girls remain the most vulnerable, often subjected to gender-based violence, forced marriages, and other forms of exploitation as they navigate life in exile without legal recognition, social safety, or institutional protection (UNHCR, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR41\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e). The gendered dimensions of displacement have been historically under-addressed in refugee studies, particularly in the context of stateless populations. Rohingya women\u0026rsquo;s vulnerability is not only a result of displacement but is also shaped by structural inequalities embedded in host countries\u0026rsquo; legal frameworks and social norms. In refugee camps and urban slums, forced marriage has emerged as a survival strategy a form of \u0026ldquo;protection\u0026rdquo; arranged by families, brokers, or community elders under coercive and exploitative conditions. This phenomenon constitutes what may be described as a \u0026ldquo;shadow market of protection,\u0026rdquo; a system of informal, patriarchal arrangements that offer temporary security through marriage but at the cost of bodily autonomy, emotional safety, and human rights.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe concept of \u0026ldquo;protection\u0026rdquo; in international refugee discourse is typically associated with legal asylum, humanitarian aid, or state responsibility. Yet for stateless refugee women, especially those unregistered or living outside official camps, \u0026ldquo;protection\u0026rdquo; is mediated through informal, and often exploitative, gendered networks. These shadow markets include not only kinship structures but also religious networks, trafficking rings, and community enforcers who operate beyond the purview of state accountability. In many cases, Rohingya girls are married off at ages as young as 12 or 13, either to avoid the threat of sexual violence, to reduce economic burden, or as a means of migration to a safer location (Human Rights Watch, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR16\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). This study focuses on two South Asian and one Southeast Asian countries likely, Bangladesh (Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar), India (West Bengal and Jammu), and Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur and Penang) to explore how such shadow markets function, and how gendered vulnerability is produced and sustained across borders. Each of these countries hosts a significant number of Rohingya refugees, yet none grants them full legal refugee status under domestic law. This lack of recognition results in what scholars have termed \u0026ldquo;institutional invisibility\u0026rdquo; (Bhatia et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e), a condition that exacerbates both structural and physical violence against women.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Bangladesh, which hosts nearly one million Rohingya refugees in Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar, the lack of livelihood options, camp overcrowding, and restricted mobility have resulted in rising cases of child and forced marriage. According to reports from UN Women and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), Rohingya families often perceive early marriage as a protective mechanism against sexual assault or as a way to cope with economic hardship (UN Women, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR47\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). Despite the presence of UNHCR and multiple humanitarian agencies, the legal framework does not provide adequate deterrence or prevention, as refugees remain outside the ambit of Bangladesh\u0026rsquo;s national legal protections.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn India, where approximately 40,000 Rohingya refugees live in informal settlements, their status is even more precarious. India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and provides no uniform legal status to refugees. Reports indicate that many young Rohingya girls are married off to local Muslim men or to members of their own community as a means to gain informal residency or community acceptance (Chakma, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR8\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e). These marriages, however, often lack legal registration, leaving women with no recourse in cases of abuse or abandonment. Additionally, the political climate in India has grown increasingly hostile toward Rohingya communities, further driving them into secrecy and dependence on informal survival networks (Ali, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR4\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMalaysia, while geographically outside South Asia but socio-politically integrated into the Rohingya migratory network, presents another complex layer. Although Malaysia hosts over 100,000 Rohingya refugees, it does not recognise them as such under domestic law. As a result, Rohingya women live in constant fear of arrest, deportation, or abuse, especially when unregistered by the UNHCR. In the absence of legal safeguards, forced marriage becomes an informal mechanism of \u0026ldquo;legal protection\u0026rdquo; through male guardianship, which in turn exposes women to domestic violence and economic exploitation (Fortify Rights, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR11\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). Religious leaders and community heads often serve as informal brokers of these marriages, reinforcing patriarchal norms under the guise of Islamic custom.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis paper argues that forced marriage among Rohingya refugee women is not merely a cultural practice, but a consequence of legal statelessness, patriarchal control, and state neglect. It builds on the growing body of feminist refugee studies, which critiques the gender-blindness of traditional asylum frameworks and calls for a more intersectional approach to refugee protection (Pittaway \u0026amp; Bartolomei, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2001\u003c/span\u003e). The paper introduces the term \u0026ldquo;shadow markets of protection\u0026rdquo; to describe the gendered and informal systems through which stateless women are coerced into exploitative relationships under the guise of safety.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMethodologically, the study draws from secondary sources including UN agency reports, academic research, investigative journalism, and NGO publications. It does not aim to generalise but to unpack the complex interplay between statelessness, gender, and informal systems of control in shaping refugee women\u0026rsquo;s lives in South Asia. By offering a comparative regional analysis of forced marriages among Rohingya women, this paper contributes to the growing literature on gendered displacement, statelessness, and informal protection economies. It also urges regional stakeholders and international agencies to move beyond the rhetoric of humanitarianism and address the socio-legal structures that normalise coercion in the name of protection.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"2. Materials and Methods","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis study employs a qualitative, feminist-informed methodology to investigate the dynamics of forced marriage and gendered vulnerability experienced by Rohingya women across Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia. Given the restricted access to field sites and the political sensitivity surrounding refugee populations in these regions, the research is grounded in secondary data analysis. This includes triangulation of humanitarian reports, NGO publications, academic literature, and media investigations. The approach aims to uncover how informal and extralegal systems what this paper terms \u0026ldquo;shadow markets of protection\u0026rdquo; emerge in the absence of legal safeguards and reproduce patriarchal forms of control over displaced women\u0026rsquo;s lives. The following sub-sections outline the data sources used, country selection criteria, and limitations of the research design.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec3\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003e2.1 Research Design and Rationale\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe research is structured as a comparative case study across three key South Asian refugee-hosting contexts: Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia. Each country presents a unique political, legal, and socio-cultural environment that informs the mechanisms through which informal protection and forced marriage manifest. The selection of these countries is purposeful and theory-driven. Bangladesh, as the largest host country for Rohingya refugees, offers insight into camp-based vulnerability. India represents a case of political hostility and informal urban encampments. Malaysia, while outside the formal South Asian region, is included due to its geographic proximity and status as a critical node in the regional Rohingya migration network (Cheung, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2012\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis regional comparison allows the research to trace common patterns such as gendered statelessness, patriarchal control, and structural invisibility while also attending to country-specific variations in law, policy, and refugee community dynamics.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec4\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003e2.2 Data Sources\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eData were drawn from three categories of sources like, UN and International Organisation Reports which includes publications by UNHCR, IOM, UNICEF, and UN Women that provide both statistical data and qualitative assessments of gender-based violence, child marriage, and legal status among Rohingya refugees. Notable among these are the Gender Assessment of the Rohingya Refugee Response (UN Women, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR47\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e) and the IOM Protection Snapshot Reports (IOM, 2021). NGO and Advocacy Group Reports: Reports from Fortify Rights, Refugees International, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other civil society actors were used to uncover on-the-ground realities not always captured by UN agencies. These sources often include first-person testimonies, interviews, and rapid assessments, particularly in areas where formal access is restricted.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAcademic Literature and Theoretical Texts, Peer-reviewed journal articles and edited volumes from refugee studies, gender studies, and South Asian legal scholarship provided the theoretical basis for key concepts such as \u0026ldquo;shadow markets of protection,\u0026rdquo; gendered precarity, and informal governance. To ensure the reliability of secondary data, only publications dated between 2017 and 2024 were included, as this period reflects the most significant and well-documented phase of Rohingya displacement following the 2017 military crackdown in Myanmar.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec5\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003e2.3 Thematic Analysis\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe primary analytical approach was thematic coding, following Braun and Clarke\u0026rsquo;s (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR6\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e) model. Key themes were identified inductively based on repeated references across sources, such as:\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cul\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eEarly/forced marriage\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eGendered violence\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eLegal invisibility\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eTrafficking and cross-border movement\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eCommunity-level enforcement\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eReligious legitimisation of marriage practices\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/ul\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThemes were then categorised by country context to map both shared and divergent experiences of Rohingya women. The coding process was iterative and reflexive, allowing new sub-themes to emerge during the data synthesis phase. Particular attention was given to intersectional vulnerabilities such as age, legal status, marital status, and family structure to avoid flattening the experiences of Rohingya women into a singular narrative.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec6\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003e2.4 Ethical Considerations\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlthough the research does not involve direct interaction with human subjects, ethical sensitivity remains paramount. Many of the secondary sources included survivor narratives, testimonies, or descriptions of traumatic experiences. These accounts were treated with respect and cited responsibly, without extracting or sensationalising personal trauma. In line with feminist research ethics, the goal is not to speak for Rohingya women but to amplify the structural conditions that shape their constrained choices.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn addition, no unverifiable or anecdotal reports from uncredited online sources were included. All data were cross-checked across multiple sources where possible. Due to the politically sensitive nature of refugee presence in countries like India and Malaysia, specific geographic identifiers have been anonymised when necessary, in line with guidelines from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC, 2018).\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec7\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003e2.5 Limitations\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis study acknowledges several limitations. First, the absence of primary ethnographic fieldwork means the analysis is mediated through the lens of organisations, journalists, and researchers, which may carry their own biases or gaps. Second, language barriers may have excluded Rohingya-language testimonies or documents not translated into English. Third, the generalisability of findings is context-bound, the experiences of Rohingya women in these three countries may differ substantially from those in other diasporic locations such as Thailand, Saudi Arabia, or Indonesia.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDespite these limitations, the study offers a rigorous and comparative exploration of how shadow systems of protection arise and operate in conditions of legal statelessness and gendered exclusion. The strength of the research lies in its capacity to draw links between macro-level legal structures and micro-level survival strategies employed by stateless refugee women in the region.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"3. Results","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis section presents the key findings of the study, organised thematically and geographically across three primary host countries i.e., Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia. Drawing on secondary sources, NGO reports, and comparative legal frameworks, the analysis uncovers how forced marriage among Rohingya women functions both as a coping mechanism and a systemic outcome of prolonged statelessness and institutional neglect. Although the specific manifestations of vulnerability vary by national context, common structural drivers such as the absence of legal refugee status, patriarchal social control, and fragmented humanitarian interventions create parallel conditions in which coerced unions flourish. The results are structured thematically to reflect the multidimensional nature of forced marriage and gendered exploitation among displaced Rohingya women. These forms of vulnerability are shaped by overlapping factors, including legal ambiguity, economic dependency, and patriarchal brokerage, which together constitute what this study terms the \u0026ldquo;shadow markets of protection.\u0026rdquo;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe findings are organised into various core themes likely, legal precarity and refugee non-recognition are examined in each country, with attention to how legal invisibility indirectly fosters early and coerced marriage. Further, the economics of marriage and the role of informal markets are analysed, showing how dowry systems, religious brokerage, and cross-border trafficking intersect with gender and displacement. Also digital surveillance, online brokerage, and misinformation are explored to understand how technology simultaneously facilitates agency and deepens vulnerability. Finally, the section considers intergenerational outcomes such as stateless births, deprivation of education, and the reproduction of gendered marginality across generations. Within each section, third-level headings provide further specificity by disaggregating findings according to country context, institutional actors, and typologies of harm.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese themes not only trace the lived experiences of Rohingya women but also reveal the structural complicity of state and humanitarian actors in the normalisation of forced marriage. The empirical findings expose how informal economies of survival operate in spaces where legal protection is absent and women\u0026rsquo;s bodies become sites of negotiation for safety, belonging, and identity. Understanding these patterns is essential for developing rights-based interventions that challenge the embedded systems of control within refugee governance and humanitarian frameworks.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.1 Bangladesh: Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar Camps\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSince the mass exodus of Rohingya from Myanmar in 2017, Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar in Bangladesh has become home to over 960,000 refugees, making it the world\u0026rsquo;s largest refugee settlement (UNHCR, 2021). While Bangladesh has allowed temporary refuge, it has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, and Rohingya refugees are not recognised under national refugee law. This legal ambiguity severely limits their rights and freedoms, particularly for women and girls, who face heightened gender-based risks within a highly restrictive camp environment. One of the most alarming manifestations of gendered vulnerability in Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar is the rise in early and forced marriages. According to UN Women (2020), child marriage has surged significantly since the refugee influx, with some reports indicating that girls as young as 12 are being married off. The motivations for these marriages are multiple, to reduce household economic burdens, to prevent sexual harassment and assault, and to gain perceived protection through male guardianship. For many refugee families, early marriage is framed as a protective strategy in the absence of formal legal or social safeguards (Human Rights Watch, 2018). Several aid agencies have reported that this surge in child and forced marriages correlates directly with deteriorating camp conditions. Overcrowding, limited access to education, food insecurity, and the prohibition on formal employment contribute to a precarious environment in which women are forced to depend on informal, patriarchal networks of protection (IOM, 2021). These networks often involve community elders, religious leaders, or distant relatives who act as marriage brokers under the guise of safeguarding girls\u0026rsquo; honour and futures.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eImportantly, such marriages are not simply the product of cultural tradition, but rather arise from structural constraints that push Rohingya families to seek informal solutions to very real threats. The lack of gender-sensitive refugee policy and inadequate access to reproductive healthcare further exacerbate these dynamics. According to a joint UNHCR-UNFPA assessment, many girls are married before reaching maturity and face severe health complications due to early pregnancy and childbirth (UNFPA, 2020). In some cases, forced marriages are transacted across national borders, indicating the emergence of a shadow economy of protection. Fortify Rights (2019) documented instances in which Rohingya girls were trafficked or married to men in neighbouring regions, including India and Malaysia, under the pretext of security or economic opportunity. While some of these marriages are arranged consensually by families seeking a better life for their daughters, others involve deception, coercion, or financial exploitation. This practice aligns with what scholars describe as \u0026ldquo;survival marriages,\u0026rdquo; a term used to capture the transactional and protective logic embedded in such unions (Bhatia et al., 2022). Religious institutions also play a complicated role in these arrangements. Many marriages in Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar are officiated by local imams without legal documentation, making it virtually impossible for girls to seek legal recourse in cases of abuse or abandonment. While Islamic leaders in the camps often claim to uphold moral values and community protection, in practice, religious authority frequently reinforces patriarchal control over Rohingya women\u0026rsquo;s lives (Farzana, 2019).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFurthermore, interviews and rapid assessments conducted by the Women\u0026rsquo;s Refugee Commission (2021) highlight how aid dependency deepens gendered power imbalances. As humanitarian resources become scarcer, families may be incentivised directly or indirectly to \u0026ldquo;exchange\u0026rdquo; their daughters for marriage in return for food, housing, or debt repayment. In this sense, forced marriage becomes embedded in the economy of displacement, wherein women\u0026rsquo;s bodies serve as units of negotiation and survival. Community-based organisations operating in the camps face challenges in addressing this issue. Legal aid services are underdeveloped, and cultural taboos often prevent survivors from speaking out. Moreover, Bangladesh\u0026rsquo;s own domestic law prohibits marriage before the age of 18 but lacks enforcement in refugee contexts due to jurisdictional ambiguities. As a result, many marriages are simultaneously illegal, unrecorded, and unmonitored, leaving Rohingya women trapped in exploitative domestic arrangements without legal or social protection (Rahman, 2020). Another underexplored aspect is the emotional toll of forced marriage. Testimonies collected by UN agencies reveal that girls often suffer from depression, isolation, and trauma, especially after childbirth. The psychological burden is compounded by the absence of mental health services and the expectation that women will remain silent to preserve family honour (UN Women, 2020). These social silences further entrench a system where marriage becomes not just a private contract but a political mechanism of control and containment. Despite multiple humanitarian interventions aimed at \u0026ldquo;mainstreaming gender\u0026rdquo; in camp responses, the core drivers of forced marriage, statelessness, poverty, and patriarchal authority remain unaddressed. This gap highlights a fundamental contradiction in refugee governance: while international actors recognise gender-based violence as a protection concern, they often fail to tackle the structural environments that normalise and perpetuate it (Freedman, 2016).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn summary, the situation in Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar reveals how gendered vulnerability among Rohingya women is shaped by legal invisibility, economic desperation, and cultural control mechanisms. Forced marriage here operates not just as a cultural artefact, but as an institutionalised response to systemic abandonment. These marriages form part of a broader \u0026ldquo;shadow market of protection,\u0026rdquo; where informal actors step in to regulate women\u0026rsquo;s lives in the absence of state or international accountability. This dynamic underscores the need for refugee policies that move beyond surface-level gender programming and address the material, legal, and political conditions that make forced marriage appear like a viable or even necessary option.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.2 India: Informal Settlements and Border Marriages\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIndia hosts an estimated 40,000 Rohingya refugees, most of whom live in informal settlements scattered across the National Capital Region, Jammu, Hyderabad, and the border districts of West Bengal and Assam (UNHCR, 2022). India is neither a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention nor its 1967 Protocol and has no domestic asylum law. As a result, Rohingya reside on short‑term \u0026ldquo;long‑stay\u0026rdquo; or \u0026ldquo;leave‑to‑remain\u0026rdquo; visas or without documentation at all making them deportable at any time under the Foreigners Act (1946) (Ali, 2020). This legal precarity fuels gender‑specific harms: women and girls become reliant on patriarchal or criminal intermediaries who promise \u0026ldquo;protection\u0026rdquo; through marriage, often under coercive conditions.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.2.1 Drivers of Forced and \u0026ldquo;Identity\u0026rdquo; Marriages:\u003c/em\u003e A key incentive for cross‑community marriages in India is informal identity assimilation. Marriage to an Indian Muslim man can provide limited social legitimacy, reduce the risk of police raids, and facilitate access to ration cards or Aadhaar numbers (Chakma, 2021). Recent field reports from the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN, 2023) document families in the border town of Basirhat who marry adolescent daughters, some as young as fourteen, to distant cousins or local men for ₹30,000\u0026ndash;₹50,000- an amount that covers smugglers\u0026rsquo; fees incurred during the Teknaf‑Petrapole border crossing. While the transactions take place in daylight, the contracts remain unregistered, leaving women without legal recourse should abuse occur.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.2.2 Role of Religious and Community Brokers:\u003c/em\u003e Rohingya settlements in Jammu and West Bengal host makeshift madrasas that have become nodes for match‑making. Imams or community elders arrange marriages under nikah ceremonies performed in Urdu or Rohingya dialect, bypassing state registration (Farzana, 2019). These brokers legitimize early unions as safeguards against sexual assault and communal hostility, particularly after episodes of anti‑Rohingya rhetoric following the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (HRW, 2022). In reality, marriage often transfers risk rather than alleviating it: reports show a rise in domestic violence cases, but women hesitate to approach Indian courts for fear of deportation (HRLN, 2023).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.2.3 Intersection with Trafficking Networks:\u003c/em\u003e Forced marriages are frequently enmeshed with inter‑state trafficking routes extending from Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar through Kolkata to Delhi. NGOs such as Shakti Vahini have recorded cases where marriage was used as a cover for labour exploitation in Delhi\u0026rsquo;s informal garment sector or for sex work along the Jaipur-Ajmer corridor (Shakti Vahini, 2022). Survivors describe being promised stable spousal arrangements only to discover they were sold multiple times before reaching their purported \u0026ldquo;husbands\u0026rdquo; (Bhatia et al., 2022). These patterns underscore how shadow markets of protection are inseparable from profit‑making logics in India\u0026rsquo;s broader trafficking economy.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.2.4 State Responses and Protection Gaps:\u003c/em\u003e Although India\u0026rsquo;s Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act 2015 criminalises child marriage and trafficking, enforcement within refugee settlements is rare due to jurisdictional ambiguity and a lack of refugee‑specific guidelines for local police (Kaur, 2021). Sporadic crackdowns such as the 2017 and 2021 mass detentions in Jammu have had unintended gendered consequences: families accelerate marriages to shield girls from arrest and family separation (UNHCR, 2022). Community‑based women\u0026rsquo;s groups, supported by M\u0026eacute;decins Sans Fronti\u0026egrave;res and HRLN, offer paralegal aid and psychosocial support; however, their reach is limited and funding uncertain (MSF, 2023).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.2.5 Everyday Impacts on Rohingya Women:\u003c/em\u003e Qualitative interviews collected by Refugees International (2022) reveal high levels of anxiety, isolation, and distrust among Rohingya women in Delhi\u0026rsquo;s Kalindi Kunj settlement. Many reported forgoing antenatal care for fear that hospital staff would alert immigration authorities. Those in forced marriages often experience a double bind: leaving an abusive husband risks detention; staying perpetuates violence. Without legal work authorisation, women rely on informal home‑based piecework, earning as little as ₹80 (US $1) per day, further entrenching economic dependence on spouses or in‑laws (Kaur, 2021).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.2.6 Implications for the Shadow‑Market Thesis:\u003c/em\u003e The Indian case illustrates how forced marriage functions as both a coping strategy and a social technology that redistributes the costs of state exclusion onto women\u0026rsquo;s bodies. Unlike Bangladesh\u0026rsquo;s camp‑based survival marriages, Indian settlements reveal a pattern of \u0026ldquo;identity marriages,\u0026rdquo; in which legal invisibility is mitigated through conjugal ties with citizens who can confer a veneer of legitimacy. Yet this veneer is fragile: it substitutes one form of insecurity (immigration raids) with another (domestic exploitation). Consequently, the shadow market in India is characterised less by overt brokerage fees and more by ambiguous exchanges of legal shelter for reproductive and domestic labour.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.3 Malaysia: Urban Statelessness and Gendered Exploitation\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlthough Malaysia lies outside the South Asian subcontinent, it remains deeply integrated into the regional Rohingya migration network. As of 2023, over 104,000 registered Rohingya refugees live in Malaysia, mostly in urban peripheries of Kuala Lumpur, Penang, and Johor Bahru (UNHCR, 2023). This number excludes tens of thousands of unregistered individuals, many of whom entered via informal maritime routes or secondary migration from Bangladesh and Myanmar. Malaysia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, and refugees are treated as undocumented migrants under immigration law, rendering them vulnerable to arrest, detention, and deportation (SUHAKAM, 2022).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFor Rohingya women, these conditions manifest in specific patterns of forced and survival marriages, mediated by religious figures, community brokers, and sometimes employers. Unlike in Bangladesh or India, where camp-based or border settlements structure community life, Malaysia\u0026rsquo;s Rohingya population is highly dispersed, making it harder for humanitarian actors to monitor gender-based abuses. In this fragmented and surveillance-heavy context, forced marriages function as a form of informal legal protection: a means of acquiring a male guardian, securing shelter, or avoiding immigration raids (Fortify Rights, 2019).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.3.1 \u0026ldquo;Nikah as Protection\u0026rdquo;: The Role of Religious Institutions:\u003c/em\u003e Marriage under Islamic rites (nikah) is frequently deployed in urban Rohingya communities as a mechanism of survival. Local imams and ustaz often officiate marriages without requiring documentation or minimum age proof. According to a field report by the Malaysian Human Rights Commission (SUHAKAM, 2022), some Rohingya girls are married as early as age 13, with community elders justifying the practice as both a religious duty and a protective necessity. These marriages are typically not registered with the Malaysian Islamic authorities (Jabatan Agama Islam), rendering them invisible to the legal system and difficult to challenge in cases of abuse.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSuch religious legitimisation also contributes to social silencing: women who attempt to leave abusive marriages are shamed for violating sharia-based marital norms, regardless of whether they consented to the union. With little access to shelters, legal aid, or women\u0026rsquo;s organisations, many Rohingya women remain trapped in exploitative relationships under the guise of religious obligation (Bhatia et al., 2022).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.3.2 The Intersection of Labour and Marriage Exploitation:\u0026nbsp;\u003c/em\u003eIn Malaysia\u0026rsquo;s informal labour market particularly in construction, domestic work, and food services marriage is sometimes offered by employers or brokers as part of a \u0026ldquo;work-for-shelter\u0026rdquo; arrangement. Interviews by Refugees International (2022) and Tenaganita (2021) have uncovered cases in which young Rohingya women were promised housing and protection but were instead coerced into sexual and domestic servitude, under the pretext of being wives. These women, lacking legal refugee status or language proficiency, are often unaware of their rights and fear reporting to authorities due to the risk of detention under Malaysia\u0026rsquo;s Immigration Act (1959/63).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSome cases involve deceptive transnational marriages, in which women are brought from Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar or Yangon by traffickers and married off to undocumented Rohingya men already residing in Malaysia. While framed as consensual family reunification, these arrangements frequently serve as entry points into cycles of abuse, debt bondage, and sexual coercion (Tenaganita, 2021).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.3.3 Gendered Violence in the Absence of Legal Status:\u003c/em\u003e The vulnerability of Rohingya women in Malaysia is further compounded by the absence of legal recourse. Although Malaysia has some domestic legislation addressing gender-based violence such as the Domestic Violence Act 1994 these laws do not apply to stateless refugees unless they are formally documented. Even then, accessing support services is hampered by language barriers, institutional distrust, and fear of police (SUHAKAM, 2022). According to a 2020 UNHCR protection monitoring report, more than 70% of reported gender-based violence cases went uninvestigated, largely due to the survivors\u0026rsquo; undocumented status and the informal nature of their marriages.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCommunity-level dispute resolution is often the only recourse, but these informal forums are dominated by male elders and religious authorities who prioritise family honour and social cohesion over women\u0026rsquo;s safety. In some instances, victims are forced to reconcile with abusive spouses or return to exploitative homes under threat of community excommunication (Fortify Rights, 2019).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.3.4 Everyday Insecurity and Coping Mechanisms:\u003c/em\u003e For Rohingya women in Malaysia, daily life is marked by invisibility and precarity. They cannot legally work, own property, or access public healthcare, and are often confined to domestic spaces to avoid police harassment. This immobility limits their social networks and increases their dependence on spouses, relatives, or employers who may exploit them.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eSome women attempt to resist these constraints by forming women-led mutual aid groups, often in partnership with local mosques or civil society organisations. These groups offer informal counselling, childcare support, and literacy programmes, though they remain small in scale and chronically underfunded (Tenaganita, 2021). Digital networks have also emerged as a space for solidarity: WhatsApp groups and Facebook pages allow Rohingya women to discreetly share information about shelters, job opportunities, and health clinics though digital surveillance and misinformation pose new risks (UNHCR, 2023).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e3.3.5 Shadow Markets and the Reproduction of Statelessness:\u003c/em\u003e Malaysia\u0026rsquo;s case reveals how forced marriage is not just a response to statelessness but also a mechanism that reproduces it. Children born of unregistered unions are often left without any documentation, continuing the intergenerational cycle of statelessness. In some cases, Malaysian authorities detain these children as \u0026ldquo;illegal immigrants,\u0026rdquo; despite their birth on Malaysian soil (SUHAKAM, 2022). The lack of birth registration also means that girls born into these unions are later at higher risk of being married off themselves, perpetuating the same vulnerabilities their mothers faced.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMarriage, therefore, becomes part of a shadow system of governance, wherein community, religion, and market forces operate in the absence of legal protection. In this informal state of exception, women\u0026rsquo;s bodies are the primary terrain of negotiation and survival bartered, protected, violated, and silenced in turn. As in Bangladesh and India, Rohingya women in Malaysia face gendered exploitation not simply because of cultural traditions but because of state policy failures and international indifference.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTable 1. Comparative Indicators of Forced Marriage and Gendered Vulnerability among Rohingya Women in India, Bangladesh and Malaysia\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https://myfiles.space/user_files/58895_8739fc6c57c1c19a/58895_custom_files/img1758808235.png\" width=\"914\" height=\"780\"\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eSources\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003e: Human Rights Watch (2018, 2023); UNHCR (2023, 2024); Tenaganita (2021); Refugees International (2023); Fortify Rights (2022); Rohingya Women Development Network (2023); Amnesty International (2022); Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (2022); Statelessness Network Asia Pacific (2023); The Wire (2023).\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTable 1, presents a comparative overview of legal frameworks, social conditions, and informal practices affecting Rohingya women in three Asian countries namely- India, Bangladesh and Malaysia. Key indicators include refugee status, marriage registration, child marriage prevalence, access to education and livelihoods, and the role of religious and community brokers. The table highlights both the diversity of national contexts and the shared structural barriers that sustain forced marriage and gendered precarity.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"4. Discussion","content":"\u003cp\u003eA comparative analysis of Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia reveals significant overlaps in the experiences of Rohingya women facing forced marriage, despite differing national policies and refugee governance frameworks. Across these three countries, the core drivers of such marriages remain consistent: legal invisibility, economic desperation, and patriarchal brokerage. Legal invisibility manifests in all three contexts, where Rohingya refugees lack recognised legal status under domestic or international refugee law. Economic desperation, shaped by restrictions on formal employment and access to services, compels families to seek security through marriage. Patriarchal brokers whether religious leaders, community elders, or employers step in as informal authorities regulating women\u0026rsquo;s lives in the absence of state protection. Despite these shared dynamics, the modalities of forced marriage differ by context. In Bangladesh, particularly in the refugee camps of Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar, marriage emerges as a camp-based coping mechanism. Families marry off young girls to reduce household size, guard against sexual violence, or secure rations and perceived protection. In India, marriage is deployed as a strategy for informal legal assimilation. Known as \u0026ldquo;identity marriages,\u0026rdquo; these unions provide Rohingya women with symbolic protection through conjugal ties to Indian Muslim men, offering a semblance of legal and social legitimacy. Meanwhile, in Malaysia, the urban dispersal of refugees creates a different dynamic here, forced marriages intersect with labour exploitation. Women are coerced into domestic or sexual servitude under the guise of marriage, often facilitated by employers or religious brokers. These distinctions demonstrate how local political economies shape the contours of gendered vulnerability, even as the consequences for women subjugation, violence, and statelessness remain consistent.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo explain these patterns more conceptually, this paper uses the term \u0026ldquo;shadow markets of protection\u0026rdquo; to describe the informal systems that arise when state institutions fail to provide legal safeguards. Drawing on theories of the informal economy and feminist critiques of refugee governance, shadow markets are defined as extra-legal mechanisms through which protection is bought, sold, or bartered often through women\u0026rsquo;s bodies. These systems include kin-based exchanges, unregulated religious marriages, and commercial transactions that resemble trafficking. While they offer a semblance of security, they also institutionalise patriarchal control, functioning as para-institutions that discipline women and redistribute state responsibility to informal actors. In this sense, they represent a form of governance from below, where survival is organised not by law but by cultural authority and market incentives.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDespite extensive humanitarian interventions, policy responses across the region remain inadequate. One major gap is the over-reliance on age-focused awareness campaigns against child marriage, which fail to address the structural drivers legal exclusion and lack of livelihood options that lead families to see marriage as a form of protection. Another issue is the compartmentalisation of services: gender-based violence programmes are often disconnected from legal aid or economic empowerment initiatives, limiting their effectiveness. Finally, the emphasis on border security over human security evident in Bangladesh\u0026rsquo;s fenced camps, India\u0026rsquo;s detention drives, and Malaysia\u0026rsquo;s immigration raids elevates the market value of marriage as a mobility or survival mechanism. These policies inadvertently increase women\u0026rsquo;s vulnerability by making forced marriage appear as the least risky of limited options.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTable 2. Multi-Level Recommendations to Address Forced Marriage and Gendered Vulnerability among Rohingya Women in South Asia\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https://myfiles.space/user_files/58895_8739fc6c57c1c19a/58895_custom_files/img1758808311.png\" width=\"913\" height=\"500\"\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eSources\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003e: UNHCR (2023, 2024); Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (2022); Rohingya Women Development Network (2023); Refugees International (2023); Tenaganita (2021); Fortify Rights (2022); ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (2023); SAARC Secretariat (2022); Statelessness Network Asia Pacific (2023); Women\u0026rsquo;s Refugee Commission (2023).\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eTable 2, outlines actionable recommendations across legal, religious, regional, and humanitarian domains. Each intervention targets a specific level of governance and is linked to a rationale rooted in field-based evidence. Together, these strategies aim to disrupt the informal systems what this paper terms \u0026ldquo;shadow markets of protection\u0026rdquo; that enable forced marriage and systemic exploitation of Rohingya women.\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eImplementing these recommendations would require political will but is feasible. Evidence from other displacement contexts such as Afghan refugees in Iran demonstrates that limited regularisation and gender-sensitive programming can reduce exploitation without leading to destabilising migration flows. Host states must move beyond emergency responses and adopt long-term, inclusive policies that uphold human rights and gender justice. It is important to acknowledge this study\u0026rsquo;s limitations. The reliance on secondary data, while necessary due to access constraints, may underrepresent hidden or unreported cases of forced marriage. Furthermore, the absence of direct testimonies from Rohingya women due to language barriers limits the depth of individual narratives. Future research should adopt participatory methods, including digital ethnography and longitudinal studies, to better capture the evolving experiences of Rohingya women in displacement.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe practice of forced marriage among Rohingya refugee women across South and Southeast Asia is not simply a relic of cultural tradition. Rather, it is a structural outcome of statelessness, institutional abandonment, and patriarchal brokerage. These marriages are deeply embedded in shadow markets of protection that convert gendered insecurity into social currency. Combating this crisis requires addressing the root causes legal exclusion, economic dependence, and patriarchal control rather than relying solely on moral appeals or symbolic interventions. Until these underlying issues are resolved, Rohingya women will continue to face a cruel paradox, they must choose between the violence of exclusion and the coercion of protection.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003e4.1 Digital Surveillance and Online Vulnerability\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs Rohingya women navigate their displacement across Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia, digital platforms have emerged as both tools of survival and instruments of control. In all three contexts, women increasingly rely on messaging services like WhatsApp and social media platforms such as Facebook to coordinate migration routes, arrange marriages, or seek solidarity through informal support networks. However, this digital turn is not without peril. Reports from Refugees International (2022) and Tenaganita (2021) show how traffickers and fraudulent marriage brokers use online platforms to target vulnerable women under the guise of proposing legitimate unions. In Bangladesh\u0026rsquo;s camps, online matchmaking services\u0026mdash;some operated from cyber caf\u0026eacute;s near the camps have facilitated the coerced movement of girls into rural Bangladeshi households, where their digital traces disappear.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn Malaysia and India, authorities have monitored online Rohingya activity as part of broader surveillance efforts targeting undocumented populations. Women who post photos, complaints, or calls for help risk being located or punished either by state actors or conservative male relatives. One 2021 case documented by SUHAKAM involved a Rohingya girl in Selayang who was forcibly married off after being accused of bringing dishonour to the family through her Instagram posts. Meanwhile, misinformation shared via WhatsApp groups such as fake news about UNHCR resettlement or marriage-linked benefits has created false hopes and facilitated exploitative arrangements. Thus, while digital spaces offer connection and information, they also extend the reach of coercion and control, particularly in environments where women\u0026rsquo;s mobility and agency are already constrained. Shadow markets of protection have adapted to the digital age, embedding themselves within virtual spaces that offer neither oversight nor accountability.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003e4.2 Intergenerational Impacts and Stateless Childhoods\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe long-term implications of forced marriage extend well beyond the immediate harm suffered by Rohingya women. Across the region, children born of unregistered or coercive marriages often inherit their parents\u0026rsquo; statelessness, compounding the cycle of legal exclusion. In Bangladesh, the government\u0026rsquo;s refusal to recognise camp births as legitimate leaves thousands of children without birth certificates, a reality that forecloses access to formal education, healthcare, or future citizenship (UNICEF, 2021). Similar patterns are observed in India, where children of Rohingya mothers and Indian fathers are frequently denied school admission due to lack of documentation even when the father holds local identity papers (HRLN, 2023). In Malaysia, undocumented children face periodic immigration crackdowns and are sometimes detained alongside their parents in overcrowded facilities, despite international prohibitions against child detention (SUHAKAM, 2022).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese intergenerational consequences are profoundly gendered. Daughters of forced unions are at high risk of early marriage themselves, especially in households where patriarchal norms go unchallenged and economic hardship persists. In India\u0026rsquo;s Rohingya settlements, activists from Shakti Vahini have reported cases where girls as young as twelve are withdrawn from informal learning centres to be married off, often in return for modest dowries that cover household expenses. Boys, on the other hand, are frequently pulled into informal labour markets collecting scrap, working in construction, or selling street food further entrenching economic precarity and family dependence on child labour.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBeyond material deprivation, these children also suffer psychological harms. Without legal identities or secure homes, many internalise a sense of marginalisation, fear, and distrust. Mental health assessments by M\u0026eacute;decins Sans Fronti\u0026egrave;res (2023) in both Bangladesh and India suggest that children of forced marriages are more likely to exhibit symptoms of depression, anxiety, and aggression. Their futures, shaped by statelessness and familial coercion, represent the reproduction of vulnerability in its most structural form. Addressing forced marriage, then, is not only a matter of women\u0026rsquo;s rights but a prerequisite for safeguarding the next generation of Rohingya refugees from perpetual marginalisation.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003e4.3 Masculinities and Marriage Brokerage: The Role of Rohingya Men\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile the experiences of Rohingya women remain central to this study, it is equally important to interrogate the role of Rohingya men fathers, brothers, husbands, and community brokers in sustaining the system of forced and strategic marriages. Across Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia, patriarchal gender norms not only shape women\u0026rsquo;s vulnerabilities but also define male identities in ways that incentivise control over female kin. In Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar, for example, fathers often marry off daughters early to reduce the number of dependents in the household or to reinforce social status within the camp. In many cases, these decisions are made by male elders through informal shura (consultative) processes that leave women and girls voiceless (UN Women, 2020).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMasculinity in displacement is often expressed through the protection and control of female relatives. Disempowered by their own lack of legal status and economic opportunity, many Rohingya men seek to reclaim authority by arranging marriages, a practice that is framed as a fulfilment of religious obligation and community duty. In India, the status of men is enhanced when they are seen as the \u0026ldquo;husband\u0026rdquo; of a vulnerable woman particularly if she is younger or undocumented as this not only grants symbolic power but can also be a pathway to local legitimacy through marital assimilation. In Malaysia, some male refugees have taken on brokerage roles, profiting from arranging marriages for newly arrived women or girls from Bangladesh or Myanmar. These actors often operate with impunity, hidden behind religious or community-based justifications for their actions (Tenaganita, 2021).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHowever, not all Rohingya men are complicit. In several documented cases, young men have resisted coerced marriages, especially when pressured into marrying much younger girls or to women trafficked from other locations. Humanitarian organisations have also reported a rise in male allies advocating against child marriage within the camps and urban settlements, particularly those with access to education or informal employment. This ambivalence underscores the need to move beyond binary framings of \u0026ldquo;perpetrator and victim\u0026rdquo; and instead engage with the ways in which masculinity itself is reshaped under the pressures of displacement, statelessness, and cultural loss.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003e4.4 Humanitarian Complicity and Institutional Gaps\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile humanitarian actors are often seen as bulwarks against gender-based violence in refugee settings, their interventions can sometimes reinforce the very structures they seek to dismantle. Across Rohingya communities in South Asia, there is growing evidence that NGOs, UN agencies, and community-based organisations, though well-intentioned, have inadvertently sustained the informal systems that facilitate forced marriage. For instance, food and cash distributions are often tied to male-headed households, reinforcing patriarchal norms and enabling male guardians to wield disproportionate power over female dependents (Bhatia et al., 2022). In Cox\u0026rsquo;s Bazar, families with more women, particularly unmarried daughters are perceived to be at higher risk of exclusion unless affiliated with a recognised household structure, thus creating material incentives for early or coerced marriages. Marriage registration remains another blind spot in humanitarian programming. In Malaysia and India, forced marriages are often unregistered and conducted informally through religious authorities or brokers. Humanitarian agencies rarely intervene in these arrangements, either due to lack of jurisdiction or out of cultural sensitivity. This institutional hesitation to challenge religious norms results in the tacit approval of underage and exploitative unions. Legal aid and protection services are similarly fragmented: gender-based violence units operate independently from refugee legal documentation centres, making it difficult to pursue justice for women who experience marital abuse or trafficking under the cover of marriage (WRC, 2021).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eMoreover, humanitarian actors often depend on community leaders including religious figures and male elders for information dissemination and programme implementation. These same actors are sometimes directly involved in marriage arrangements, thereby creating a conflict of interest that is rarely acknowledged. When efforts are made to resist child marriage, they are typically directed at girls through awareness workshops and vocational training, without sufficiently engaging male decision-makers or challenging structural barriers such as poverty, food insecurity, and legal exclusion. The complicity of humanitarian institutions is not the result of malice but of operational constraints, cultural caution, and fragmented mandates. Nonetheless, their actions or inactions can normalise harmful practices by failing to address the power asymmetries that define Rohingya marriage markets. If shadow markets of protection are to be dismantled, humanitarian systems must move toward intersectional, rights-based, and gender-transformative approaches that hold all actors including themselves accountable.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"5. Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eThe phenomenon of forced marriage among Rohingya refugee women across South and Southeast Asia cannot be understood in isolation from the structural conditions of statelessness, legal exclusion, economic precarity, and patriarchal governance. This study has illustrated how the absence of formal refugee protections in Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia has created fertile ground for the emergence of shadow markets of protection informal, extra-legal systems that offer survival in exchange for women\u0026rsquo;s bodily autonomy. Within these shadow markets, marriage becomes more than a cultural or religious institution; it functions as a transactional mechanism for mobility, shelter, respectability, and sometimes even rations. The comparative analysis of these three countries reveals that although the modalities of forced marriage vary from dowry-driven exchanges in Bangladesh to assimilation strategies in India and exploitative labour-conjugal arrangements in Malaysia, the consequences are alarmingly similar curtailed freedom, cycles of violence, and multigenerational statelessness. In each setting, the institution of marriage is weaponised to manage displacement, discipline femininity, and consolidate patriarchal control in the absence of legal norms and rights-based frameworks.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMoreover, this paper challenges the tendency to frame forced marriage solely as a \u0026ldquo;women\u0026rsquo;s issue.\u0026rdquo; The complicity and participation of Rohingya men whether as fathers seeking security, brokers profiting from despair, or young husbands caught in their own webs of coercion show that masculinity is both a site of power and vulnerability. Understanding how patriarchal expectations drive men to assert control or conform to social pressure is essential for building comprehensive interventions. The humanitarian sector, too, is not outside the dynamics it seeks to reform. Aid delivery mechanisms that centre male-headed households, avoid confronting religious authorities, or fragment legal and gender-based services inadvertently reproduce the very systems that facilitate exploitation. Without actively interrogating their own operational norms and engagement models, humanitarian actors risk becoming silent partners in the perpetuation of gender-based harm.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis study also underscores that forced marriage is not a discrete or one-time event it is an intergenerational phenomenon. Children born from such unions often inherit the statelessness and marginalisation of their mothers, repeating the cycle of invisibility, exploitation, and vulnerability. The risks are especially acute for girls, who are likely to be married off early, and for boys, who are thrust into labour markets with no protections or educational prospects. To break this cycle, regional actors must adopt a multi-pronged, gender-transformative approach to refugee governance. Legal recognition of refugee status, access to livelihoods, and gender-sensitive social protection must be placed at the centre of policy responses. States must also move beyond security-centric frameworks that criminalise displacement and instead prioritise dignity, agency, and inclusion. At the same time, the international community must hold host governments and humanitarian agencies accountable for gender-based rights violations occurring under their watch. Ultimately, what this study reveals is that the violence Rohingya women face through forced marriage is not simply a matter of cultural tradition or individual abuse. It is a form of structural and systemic violence, a mechanism through which statelessness, displacement, and patriarchy converge to police, commodify, and control women\u0026rsquo;s lives. Without meaningful legal reform, sustained advocacy, and regional cooperation, these shadow markets of protection will continue to flourish in the gaps left by formal institutions. And until those gaps are filled with justice, recognition, and rights, the cost will be borne again and again by the bodies and futures of Rohingya women.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003ch2\u003eFunding Statement\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003eClinical Trial Number\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNot applicable. This study does not involve any clinical trial or medical intervention.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003eEthical Approval / Informed Consent\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAs this study is based entirely on publicly available secondary sources (e.g., legal documents, NGO reports, and media investigations), no ethical approval or informed consent was required.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003eAuthor Contribution\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Corresponding author (Irshad Khan), was primarily responsible for the conceptual development of the study, drafting the manuscript, and conducting the detailed literature review. He compiled and analysed secondary data from humanitarian reports, news sources, and academic studies to frame the paper\u0026apos;s core arguments. Irshad Khan also prepared the visual elements (including tables and figures) and ensured the manuscript adhered to the journal\u0026rsquo;s style and formatting requirements. He coordinated the submission process and integrated the co-author\u0026rsquo;s feedback during revisions.Dr. Iftekhar Ahmad Ansari provided overall research supervision and intellectual guidance throughout the paper. He contributed significantly to refining the theoretical framework, strengthening the analytical depth, and reviewing multiple drafts of the manuscript. His critical insights helped shape the interdisciplinary approach and ensured the research maintained scholarly rigour and regional relevance. Dr. Iftekhar Ahmad Ansari also reviewed and approved the final version of the paper for submission.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch2\u003eAcknowledgement\u003c/h2\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe authors extend sincere gratitude to the individuals and organisations whose insights, reports, and advocacy efforts have informed the findings of this research. Special thanks to field-based NGOs and community organisations in Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia that have worked tirelessly to document and support Rohingya women survivors of gender-based violence. The contributions of researchers, activists, and legal practitioners whose publicly accessible data and testimonies have made this study possible are deeply appreciated.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAsia Pacific Refugee Rights Network. (2022). \u003cem\u003eDisplacement in South and Southeast Asia: Regional Trends and Gaps.\u003c/em\u003e Bangkok: APRRN.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights. (2023). \u003cem\u003eRegional strategies for the protection of displaced women and girls in Southeast Asia.\u003c/em\u003e Jakarta: AICHR.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAmnesty International. 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(2023). \u003cem\u003eEmpowering Displaced Women: From Aid Dependency to Agency.\u003c/em\u003e New York: WRC.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":true,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true},"keywords":"Rohingya women, Forced marriage, Statelessness, Gender-based violence, Refugee governance, Shadow markets","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7183932/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7183932/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eThis study investigates the experiences of Rohingya women in Bangladesh, India, and Malaysia who are subjected to forced and early marriages through informal, coercive systems that operate in the absence of legal recognition and formal refugee protection. Drawing on secondary data from humanitarian reports, academic literature, and media sources, the paper introduces the concept of \u0026ldquo;shadow markets of protection\u0026rdquo;, patriarchal and often exploitative networks that offer temporary safety and social legitimacy through marriage, frequently at the expense of women\u0026rsquo;s autonomy, bodily integrity, and future opportunities. These marriages are not simply traditional or cultural phenomena but rather strategic responses to the structural violence of statelessness, institutional neglect, and gender-based discrimination. In contexts where state protection is absent and humanitarian aid is fragmented, such unions become tools of survival and social navigation. The paper examines how gendered precarity intersects with displacement, legal invisibility, poverty, and patriarchal brokerage to produce specific forms of harm that disproportionately affect Rohingya women and girls. By comparing the legal, social, and economic frameworks across the three host countries, the study underscores the urgent need for coherent regional policies and gender-sensitive interventions that confront the structural drivers of forced marriage in refugee settings.\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"Rohingya Women and the Shadow Markets of Protection: A Study of Gendered Vulnerability in South and Southeast Asia","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2025-09-25 13:56:40","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7183932/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"978cf59d-556f-4c13-bc66-e419454b33e0","owner":[],"postedDate":"September 25th, 2025","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"posted","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2025-11-24T09:54:10+00:00","versionOfRecord":[],"versionCreatedAt":"2025-09-25 13:56:40","video":"","vorDoi":"","vorDoiUrl":"","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-7183932","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-7183932","identity":"rs-7183932","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"XKTyCvWXoU3ODBz1xrDgd","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}