Rohingya rape survivors’ babies emerge

Theirs is a misery spoken of only in murmurs — some ended their pregnancies early by taking abortion pills

Tucked away in the shadows of her family’s bamboo shelter, the girl hid from the world.

She was 13, and she was petrified. Two months earlier, soldiers had broken into her home back in Myanmar and raped her, an attack that drove her and her terrified family over the border to Bangladesh. Ever since, she had waited for her period to arrive. Gradually, she came to realise that it would not.

For the girl, a Rohingya Muslim who agreed to be identified by her first initial, A, the pregnancy was a prison she was desperate to escape. The rape itself had destroyed her innocence. But carrying the baby of a Buddhist soldier could destroy her life.

More than 10 months have passed since Myanmar’s security forces launched a sweeping campaign of rape and other brutalities against the Rohingya, and the babies conceived during those assaults have been born.

Viewed as shameful

For many of their mothers, the births have been tinged with fear — not only because the infants are reminders of the horrors they survived, but because their community often views rape as shameful, and bearing a baby conceived by Buddhists as sacrilege.

Theirs is a misery spoken of only in murmurs. Some ended their pregnancies early by taking cheap abortion pills available throughout the camps. Others agonised over whether to give their unloved babies away.

One woman was so worried about her neighbours discovering her pregnancy that she suffered silently through labour in her shelter, stuffing a scarf in her mouth to swallow her screams.

She worried that giving birth to this child would leave her so tainted that no man would ever want her as his wife. Her mother took her to a clinic for an abortion. But A was so frightened by the doctor’s description of possible side effects that she thought she would die.

Abandoned babies

And so she retreated to her shelter, where she tried to flatten her growing belly by wrapping it in tight layers of scarves. She hid there for months, emerging only to use the latrine a few metres away.

There was nothing to do but wait with dread for the baby who symbolised the pain of an entire people to arrive.

For the women who became pregnant during last year’s wave of attacks in Myanmar, to speak the truth is to risk losing everything.

Because of that, no one knows how many rape survivors have given birth.

But given the vastness of the sexual violence relief groups had braced for a spike in deliveries and scores of abandoned babies.