This report features data and infographics by Sadia Tasmim, Suhala Samsunnahar, Sayama Sharmeen Haque, Md. Ferdous Hasan Hridoy, Sadia Islam, and Sheikh Sadikur Rahman; for the Data Journalism Course at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.
For a Rohingya girl leaving one of the camps with a local facilitator, the journey can take three to four days to cross the Naf River. It can cost her family everything they own. And it can end in one of two places: a rented room in Kuala Lumpur, or the bottom of the Bay of Bengal. Almost every Rohingya girl who has attempted the boat crossing carries some version of that choice with her.
More than 1.2 million Rohingya across 33 camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar, have turned marriage into something larger than a private arrangement between two families. It has become an export route. A promised husband in Malaysia now counts as one of the only legal-sounding reasons a young woman can leave the camp at all, and traffickers along the coast have built an entire economy around that single fact.
No Bangladeshi agency publishes a disaggregated count of “marriage trafficking” separate from human trafficking generally. But court records, Coast Guard briefings, and years of on-the-ground reporting lay out, in unusual detail, how the system actually works.
The only legal reason to leave
Rohingya refugees cannot legally work in Bangladesh, and they depend almost entirely on humanitarian food vouchers that keep shrinking. The World Food Programme warned in March 2025 that a severe funding shortfall would force it to halve monthly rations from $12.50 to $6 per person; that specific cut was averted at the last moment after the United States and other donors stepped in with fresh emergency funding.
Camps also give girls little privacy, living as they do under plastic sheeting on bamboo frames — conditions that push families toward marriage abroad as a form of protection. For many Rohingya girls, camp life narrows down to two options: marry for protection, or leave by whatever route is available.
The pitch, the marriage offer, rarely comes from a stranger. It usually arrives through someone already trusted: a relative settled in Malaysia, a neighbour who left years earlier, or a matchmaker working inside the camp itself. Families are told their daughter will “join her husband,” that their burdens will lighten, and that a groom abroad can send money home.
Some majhis have been drawn into facilitating trafficking inside the camps. This network reaches local facilitators, fishermen, elected union-level officials in host communities and even some residents of Rohingya camps. Majhis themselves occupy an exposed position between ordinary residents and the armed groups operating around them.
Local facilitators in association with the trafficking network arrange the journey from camp to coast, and the terms of the “deal” often shift once a girl is already travelling — a pattern that has held steady across years of survivor accounts, even as routes and destinations changed. The true scale of marriage-linked trafficking remains undocumented, since no agency separates it from trafficking generally.
The secret shelter that runs the trade
Once a family agrees to a match, a local facilitator collects the Rohingya girl and moves her out of the camp at night toward the surrounding unions of Baharchhara and Sabrang. Victims are typically held in secret shelter into Teknaf’s hills, where traffickers confiscate phones and cash while ransom demands go out to families. This stage now runs through a specific cluster of settlements — Maheshkhalia Para, Tulatoli, Lambari and Rajarchara in Teknaf Sadar, and Noakhalipara, Shilkhali, Boro Dale, Kachchhpia and Mathabhanga in Baharchhara union.
In one ward of Baharchhara, brokers reportedly collect roughly Tk 20,000-30,000 per person from the trafficking rings, while fishermen supply and pilot the boats and autorickshaw or CNG drivers move victims between the camp and the coast. None of these people necessarily thinks of themselves as a trafficker. Each is simply a paid link in a longer chain of the trafficking network. Coast Guard and Navy raids keep uncovering these sites: 39 people rescued from a Baharchhara hillside hideout, 32 rescued from a papaya garden being used as a holding pen, and 55 rescued from a Baharchhara-bound trawler in a single operation.
Boats leaving the Teknaf coast often sail north first, toward Myanmar’s Rakhine coast, to pick up more passengers before heading into open water. Two of the deadliest recent departures trace back to Pauktaw and Ponnagyun townships, both under Arakan Army control. According to survivors and community sources, this armed group profits from, and actively facilitates, this traffic. Those who survive the crossing are handed to relatives or a waiting “husband” in Malaysia. Those whose families cannot pay in full are held for further ransom.
Money that leaves no trail
Rohingya refugees hold no bank accounts, so payment for a “bridal journey” moves almost entirely through hundi, an unregulated, trust-based transfer network. A groom or relative in Malaysia deposits ringgit with an agent there; that agent instructs a counterpart in Cox’s Bazar to release the equivalent in taka to the trafficker or the bride’s family. Agents are known to charge between Tk 30,000 and 300,000 per refugee, often paid directly by relatives abroad rather than by the family still in camp. Families who cannot cover the gap sell whatever jewellery or savings remain, or take on informal loans inside the camp.
Almost none of this leaves a receipt or a signed contract. That absence of a paper trail remains a central reason trafficking cases are so difficult to prosecute — a problem the government has struggled with for years despite repeated promises to open a dedicated anti-trafficking tribunal in Cox’s Bazar.
The deadliest year on record
No single public database captures how many Rohingya girls have left Teknaf specifically for marriage-linked journeys, but the broader trend tells its own story. Women and children make up more than half of recent sea departures, and marriage remains one of the most cited reasons women give for leaving.
Roughly 6,500 Rohingya attempted the sea crossing in 2025, and nearly 900 of them were reported missing or dead — the deadliest year on record for the route, with one in seven who set out never arriving. The pace has only quickened since. UN data shows 2,907 people left Bangladesh and Myanmar by boat between January and March 2026, an 85 per cent jump from the same period in 2025. Aid agencies have repeatedly appealed for stronger search-and-rescue coordination as the toll climbs, and monsoon-season departures continue even when the danger is obvious to everyone involved.
Rescued, rarely convicted
Every lever meant to stop this trade — camp movement restrictions, Coast Guard patrols, Border Guard raids, anti-trafficking tribunals — keeps running, and the numbers show the limits of that effort. Coast Guard’s East Zone, which covers Teknaf, rescued 558 trafficking victims over one recent year — 103 children, 161 women and 294 men — and arrested 41 alleged traffickers, with more than 500 of those rescues packed into just six months between September 2025 and March 2026.
A month-long blitz in October 2025 alone rescued 347 victims and arrested 47 suspects. Since 2016, police have also logged 1,134 Malaysia-bound rescues and 508 trafficker arrests in Cox’s Bazar. Arrests rarely translate into convictions. Between 2013 and 2019, only 0.5 per cent of roughly 4,700 trafficking cases filed in Bangladesh ended in a conviction, and the government’s own pledge to open a dedicated anti-trafficking tribunal in Cox’s Bazar still has not materialised.
The bottom lines
What the record shows, above all, is a system that operates through named villages, named leaders, and a pricing structure that has stayed remarkably stable across years of raids. That stability exists because the conditions feeding it — statelessness, hunger, and the absence of any legal way out of the camps — have not changed at all. Raids can seize a boat or a hideout. They cannot seize the reason a family agreed to send their daughter across the water in the first place.
Zulker Naeen is a Research Coordinator, Center for Critical and Qualitative Studies (CQS) and Adjunct Faculty, Department of Media Studies and Journalism (MSJ), University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). Views expressed are the writer’s own.
Zulker Naeen
Zulker Naeen is a Bangladesh-based digital rights advocate and researcher examining disinformation, propaganda, and rights violations surrounding the Rohingya crisis.
