Rohingya rape victims’ babies quietly emerge
Many go into hiding during pregnancy
UKHIYA, BANGLADESH: 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. 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 gave birth to unloved babies; some agonised over whether to give them away. One woman was so worried about her neighbors discovering her pregnancy that she suffered silently through labor in her shelter, stuffing a scarf in her mouth to swallow her screams.
In Bangladesh’s overcrowded refugee camps where shelter walls are made of hole-pocked plastic and sounds travel easily across the tree-stripped hills, A knew that hiding her pregnancy would be difficult and hiding a wailing newborn impossible. She worried that giving birth to this child would leave her so tainted that no man would ever want her as his wife. In a panic, she told her mother, who swiftly 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.
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 meters 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’s Rakhine state, 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 the worst: a spike in deliveries from traumatised women, and scores of babies left abandoned in the camps that are home to around 900,000 Rohingya refugees.
By June, though, the birth rate in medical clinics had remained relatively steady, and only a handful of babies have been found left behind. Aid workers began to suspect that many women had quietly dealt with their pregnancies themselves.
“They will not come forward for antenatal checkups — they will try to hide their pregnancy,’’ says Medecins Sans Frontieres midwife Daniela Cassio, a sexual violence specialist. “I’m sure many have also died during the pregnancy or during the delivery.’’
Yet sprinkled throughout the sprawling camps, you will find women who have grown weary of the silence. Some of those women and girls consented to be identified in this story by their first initials only, citing fear of retaliation from Myanmar’s military.
The monsoon rains thundering down on the roof of A’s shelter threaten to drown out her words. Her voice still has a childlike softness, and when she speaks of the soldiers who raped her, it fades to a whisper.
Already, several men who had shown interest in marrying her have walked away when they’ve learned about the attack. Her parents worry no man will ever want her. And yet, with their blessing, she leans in close to share her story. “I want justice,’’ she says, anxiously turning a plastic cup over and over in her hands. “That’s why I’m talking to you.’’
For some rape survivors, the idea of giving birth to a child conceived by someone other than a Muslim felt like a fate worse than death. So they turned to clinics and makeshift pharmacies set up in the camps for abortion drugs they hoped could end their agony.
The pain of D’s rape was so severe that she had to wrap a supportive scarf around her battered pelvis to endure the dayslong walk to Bangladesh. Yet through it all, she survived. When she discovered she was pregnant, she wished she had not. She was a widow, and to give birth to a child without a husband was to invite admonishment. She quickly sought out a pharmacy to find the drugs that would induce an abortion. As she swallowed the first tablet, she cried and prayed to Allah. But nothing happened.
So she bought more medicine, taking pill after pill until, at last, her stomach twisted with intense cramps and heavy blood began to flow. Her relief was instant. “I felt that I had found a new world,’’ she says. “I would have taken poison if I had to give birth to that baby because it is a big shame for me. People would criticise me.’’
Others, though, found surprising support. So certain was T that her husband would divorce her, that she waited a month to tell him about her pregnancy. Her heart hammered the day she revealed the truth. When she did, her husband began to cry, and so did she. “It’s not your fault,’’ he reassured her. “Maybe it was your fate that this happened to you. You didn’t want this.’’
She had no idea she could go to a hospital for an abortion. But one day, she met an aid worker who was walking through
the camps looking for pregnant women in distress. The aid worker provided her with abortion drugs. T took the pills, then visited a religious leader who performed a ceremony that he said would remove the baby. When she began to bleed, she felt as if a dirtiness inside her had been washed clean.
Slowly, a few women have forgiven themselves, though there was never anything to forgive. H, who also had an abortion, was once so ashamed of her pregnancy that she told no one.
Now, though, she has begun to share her story with others, and has focused her fury on the men who brutalised her.
In Myanmar, where the Rohingya people have few rights and Rohingya women even less, she had no voice. Here, she says, she feels she can finally speak.