By Adeola Ogunnoiki, PACS, University of Manitoba
Date: Dec 14, 2025
Introduction
Despite more than eight years of displacement and large-scale humanitarian aid, trafficking of Rohingya women and children remains a serious and growing crisis. In 2024, the Anti‑Trafficking Working Group (ATWG) identified about 316 refugees from Rohingya camps as trafficking victims; including 78 women and 12 girls.
In one recent case, about 24 Rohingya refugees including women and children were rescued from traffickers in the hills of Teknaf, after being promised passage to Malaysia. Such incidents mirror countless others that go unreported. These documented cases underscore not only individual tragedy, but also systemic failures, statelessness, lack of legal protection or regular work, overcrowded camps, and weak enforcement of anti‑trafficking laws that continue to put Rohingya women and children at extreme risk of exploitation.
Policy Gaps: Where Protection Falls Short
At the heart of this crisis lies statelessness. Without citizenship or legal recognition, Rohingya refugees fall outside national protection systems. They cannot access lawful employment, formal education, or justice mechanisms, leaving them dependent on humanitarian aid and vulnerable to traffickers who exploit desperation by offering false escape routes.
Bangladesh’s anti-trafficking laws, though progressive on paper, are difficult to enforce within the chaotic, densely populated camps of Cox’s Bazar. Prosecutions remain rare. Survivors often fear reporting abuses due to stigma, threats, or a fundamental lack of trust in institutions.
These challenges are compounded by limited regional cooperation. Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia, Thailand, and India all form part of a trafficking corridor, yet they lack strong mechanisms for intelligence sharing, cross-border prosecution, or coordinated victim repatriation. Trafficking networks exploit these weak points with alarming ease.
Gendered vulnerabilities further aggravate risk. Rohingya women face economic dependency, early marriage pressures, constrained mobility, and limited access to education; all of which make them prime targets for traffickers offering marriage, employment, or migration.
Policy and Community Solutions: A Roadmap Forward
These policy weaknesses show not only what has gone wrong, but where solutions must begin. A sustainable response starts with recognition and inclusion. Providing Rohingya refugees with access to education, livelihood opportunities, and some form of legal identity would significantly reduce their exposure to traffickers. Empowered women are far less likely to be deceived or coerced.
Regional cooperation must also be strengthened. Countries along trafficking routes should develop joint frameworks for intelligence exchange, cross-border investigations, and survivor protection. The Bali Process on People Smuggling and Trafficking in Persons offers an underutilized platform for such collaboration, but meaningful progress requires political will and shared investment.
At the community level, humanitarian agencies can expand community-based protection programs; training Rohingya volunteers as early warning monitors, mediators, and educators. Internal community leadership fosters trust and resilience in ways external actors alone cannot achieve.
The Role of the International Community
Sustained funding for UNHCR, IOM, and frontline NGOs is essential to maintain shelters, counselling services, safe spaces, and awareness campaigns. Donor governments should further support long-term solutions, including safe migration channels, skills programs for women, and resettlement pathways for the most vulnerable.
Importantly, Myanmar must be held accountable. The military junta’s ongoing persecution ensures that safe return remains impossible for now. Until root causes are addressed including ethnic discrimination, systemic violence, and denial of citizenship, displacement and exploitation will persist.
What Needs to Happen Now
- Expand legal documentation and identity protections for Rohingya refugees
- Strengthen cross-border intelligence sharing and coordinated prosecutions
- Increase funding for community-based protection and women-led initiatives
- Establish safe livelihood and education pathways within camps
- Ensure accountability for traffickers and complicit actors across the region
- Maintain international pressure on the Myanmar junta to end structural persecution
Conclusion
For the Rohingya, displacement was meant to offer safety not usher in another form of captivity. Yet behind the tarpaulin roofs and crowded pathways of the camps, traffickers have built invisible chains, binding women and children to an economy of exploitation. These chains are forged not from metal, but from poverty, statelessness, gendered vulnerability, and global indifference.
And still, there is resilience. There are police officers who refuse to ignore missing girls. Aid workers who risk everything to rescue survivors. Rohingya women who teach their peers how to stay safe. NGOs building shelters. Civil society groups amplifying stories previously silenced.
The path forward is long, but it is not impossible. Justice begins with recognizing the Rohingya as human beings deserving of dignity, opportunity, and safety. It continues with laws, coordination, education, and compassion.
Every effort whether rescuing one girl or strengthening an entire system weakens the grip of trafficking. Every voice raised against injustice brings us closer to a world where no woman, no child, and no community must live with the fear of being forgotten.
To break these invisible chains, we must first see them and then commit, together, to dismantling them.