Sexual Violence Against Rohingya Men and Boys

Sexual Violence Against Rohingya Men and Boys

By Women’s Refugee Commission, November 2018

“The same thing that is happening to our women, it’s happening to our men as well. It is too shameful to talk about.” —“Kader,” men with disabilities focus group

In August 2017, Myanmar authorities began launching deadly “clearance operations” against the Rohingya people in northern Rakhine State, resulting in thousands of deaths and forcing more than700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar has documented widespread, systematic rape and other sexualized torture of Rohingya women and girls and has found credible reports of sexual violence against Rohingya men and boys. Yet little is known about this male-directed violence. The Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) conducted an exploratory qualitative study to examine the nature and characteristics of sexual violence perpetrated against Rohingya men and boys in Myanmar and in Cox’s Bazar District, Bangladesh, and to evaluate male survivors’ access to services in Bangladesh. The study also probed intersections with violence against Rohingya women and girls.In July 2018, two WRC researchers undertook fieldwork in four sections of Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar District, Bangladesh. Methods included key informant interviews with 45 humanitarian responders and human rights experts and 21 focus groups with 109 refugees, including adolescent boys and girls, young men, men and women, older men, and men with physical and intellectual disabilities. Data were coded and analyzed thematically using NVivo 12, a qualitative data management software. The University of New South Wales granted ethics approval for this study.

The Rohingya people, a stateless minority group in Myanmar, have suffered persecution, discrimination, and denial of basic rights for decades. Waves of state-sanctioned violence and resulting displacement have occurred since the 1970s, with tens of thousands of Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Thailand. In August 2017, the Myanmar authorities unleashed particularly brutal “clearance operations” that have since sparked an exodus of more than 700,000 refugees to Bangladesh.

 Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) estimates that 8,170 Rohingya, including 1,273 children under five, were killed through violence within the first month alone. In a survey of more than1,300 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, 92% of respondents reported having directly experienced or witnessed violence in Myanmar since August 2017. The violence and oppression have not ended: as of August 2018, around 1,700 Rohingya were continuing to flee to Bangladesh each month. The United Nations (UN) and human rights investigators have documented widespread human rights abuses and atrocities against the Rohingya people in Myanmar, including torture and in human treatment, rape and other forms of sexual violence, extrajudicial and summary killings, and enforced disappearance, among other crimes.

 The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar has called for Myanmar military officials to be investigated for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. While significant attention has been directed toward the Myanmar Armed Forces as perpetrators of violence, others, including the Border Guard Force, Myanmar Police Force, local administrators, and civilians, also work in concert with the military to commit atrocities. Myanmar state security forces have long perpetrated rape and other forms of sexualized violence against ethnic minority women and girls, including the Rohingya.

 Yet the recent campaign of sexual violence against the Rohingya has been particularly brutal and widespread, with the Fact-Finding Mission reporting that sexual violence was perpetrated on a “massive scale” The UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict suggested that the use of sexual violence against Rohingya women and girls may be genocidal in its intent, stating that it served “as a calculated tool of terror seemingly aimed at the extermination and removal of the Rohingya as a group.” For those women and girls who were able to reach Bangladesh, the refugee camps have brought relative safely, but they remain highly vulnerable to sexual violence and other forms of GBV.

Some accounts of sexual violence against Rohingya men and boys in northern Rakhine State, Myanmar, have been documented (see Appendix A), but little is known about the nature or extent of this violence. Elsewhere in Myanmar, accounts of sexual violence against ethnic minority men and boys, persons with diverse SOGIESC, male political prisoners, and ordinary male prisoners have been reported (see Appendix B). The scarcity of information about sexual violence against Rohingya men and boys could reflect, among other factors, a dearth of data on this issue, the reluctance or inability of male survivors and communities to discuss victimization, or a rarity of this type of male-directed violence. Given the lack of data on this topic, this study was exploratory in its approach and aimed to garner deeper insights into sexual violence against Rohingya men and boys in Myanmar and Bangladesh. It is part of a broader three-country study that WRC is undertaking to examine sexual violence against forcibly displaced men and boys, research that includes the ways in which this violence intersects with violence against women and girls and how it impacts the lives of women and girls.