Rohingya children have become victims of mass displacement, with some of them being internally or externally displaced because of long-standing violence and prejudice in their own country. Currently, a substantial number of them are residing in refugee camps in Bangladesh. They lost all their rights, including the right to retain their native country's nationality. Their basic human rights are violated when they become stateless refugees in the era of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which emphasize equality, equity, and social justice. Rohingya children in refugee camps face adversity and have limited access to informal education and health services. Due to a lack of nutritious food, healthcare services, medicines, and basic sanitation, the health conditions for some of them are exceedingly poor. Children, particularly young girls, are vulnerable to gender-based violence, child marriage, and human trafficking, both for sex and manual labor. This chapter investigates the childhood experiences of displaced Rohingya children living in Bangladeshi refugee camps.
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The Rohingya, as a stateless ethnic minority group in Myanmar, has been suffering from brutal oppression, discrimination, violence, torture, unjust prosecution, murder and extreme poverty for decades (Mohsin, 2020; Lewis, 2019; Reliefwave, 2019). Long term mistreatment, oppression and conflict forced this ethnic minority to flee from their homes and seek refuge in neighboring Bangladesh and other countries such as India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia and even in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nepal. Among the Rohingya refugees, many are children who escaped from their homeland with traumatic experiences and memories, living in overcrowded makeshift camps exhausted and battling with diseases and lack of nutrition as they are in desperate basic human needs (Jean, 2020).
This is not a new phenomenon in the migration history of South and Southeast Asia (Prodip, 2017). Bangladesh has a lengthy history of hosting Rohingya refugees from Myanmar's Rakhine State. In 1978, the Cox's Bazar district in Bangladesh received a large number of Rohingya refugees (about 250,000 people), most of whom returned to Myanmar after international pressure was exerted on the Myanmar government to allow them to return (Amnesty International, 2004). Another big influx of Rohingya refugees coming to Bangladesh took place in 1991–1992, with approximately 250,000 crossing the border (Kiragu et al., 2011; UNHCR, 2007). They were recognized as refugees by the Government of Bangladesh (GoB) and were housed in camps in the Cox's Bazar district. Until 2017, these camps housed approximately 32,000 registered refugees. The camps still exist, but they are now part of much bigger refugee facilities that house newly arrived refugees (UNHCR, 2018). Many more Rohingya who arrived after 1992 were not recognized as refugees by the Bangladesh authorities and were forced to live in deplorable conditions in “refugee-like settings” in makeshift camps encircling the official camps and in Shamlapur on the coast (Uddin, 2012). Following the October 2016 conflict in Rakhine State, an additional 70,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh. The Bangladesh government permitted them to cross the border freely, and the Bangladeshi populace responded with an outpouring of individual support. Then there was a mass influx of 712,179 Rohingya from 25 August to 31 December 2017 and an additional 13,223 arrived since January 2018, escaping the horrific violence, killing, and persecution that was taking place in Myanmar and sought shelter in Bangladesh, half of whom were children (Alam, 2020; Parmar, Jin, Walsh & Scott, 2019; Kipgen, 2019). It was the largest mass exodus in modern history since the 1994 Rwandan genocide (Save The Children, Undated) and created a major humanitarian crisis that exacerbated the already-existing challenges in providing assistance to the estimated 200,000 to 300,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (UNHCR, 2018). Moreover, Rohingya refugees have faced numerous challenges since they arrived in Bangladesh, including natural disasters such as floods, landslides, heavy storms, and now the COVID-19 pandemic (Mohsin, 2020).
Researching in the crisis contexts is not easy as development workers mostly address the issues as day-to-day priorities from the practitioners’ perspectives. Research they have done mostly for their organizational needs could be termed as practitioner research to deal with issues they are facing in the field. When crises exist for a longer time and then academic researchers step in, and then more academic rigorous research takes place and that has happened about the Rohingya crisis.