Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh — Salma lives in a crowded refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar. On a late evening in September 2023, she put on a colorful sari, her best jewelry and glittery eyeshadow, then rushed out of the tarpaulin shelter she’s called home for the last seven years to meet four of her friends.
The five women – all hijra, a South Asian cultural identity which includes trans, intersex and non-binary people – were headed to a wedding outside their camp, where, Salma said, they had been invited to dance and would be paid 5,000 Bangladeshi taka (about $45) for doing so. But they would never make it to the wedding.
Salma (whose name, like all the hijras in this story, has been changed to protect her from reprisals) told CNN that the friends were about halfway to their destination, chatting as they crossed a paddy field, when a group of men wearing black masks ambushed them. Then, Salma said, she was abducted and raped.
The men, who Salma said were carrying knives and threatened to kill them, asked the hijras to remain quiet, tied their hands behind their back, beat and blindfolded them, and ordered them to walk. “My heart was pounding,” Salma said.
According to Salma, the men separated her from her friends and led her through wet mud, across a stream, and then uphill, where she said someone she could not see pushed her to the ground and forcibly removed her sari. “You do it first,” she said she heard one of the men saying. “Let me do it first,” came another voice. Then, she felt a gun’s butt being pressed into her stomach.
“They flipped my body. This way I was raped seven times,” she said. “I begged death from God.”
Despite the horror of what happened, Salma told CNN that it was not the first time that she’s been violently sexually assaulted inside or outside the refugee camp. “I have lost count of how many times I have been raped,” she said.
In these camps that should have offered all Rohingyas safety after fleeing what the United Nations described as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” in their native Myanmar, multiple hijras told CNN that they routinely face sexual violence, harassment and transphobic abuse.
Of the night she was gang raped, Salma said: "I begged death from God". CNN
Victimized twice
Salma and nine other Rohingya hijras CNN interviewed opened up, some of them for the first time, about being regularly targeted by armed criminal gangs, Rohingya men, and even authorities, inside and outside the camps. The hijras said that they rarely report their victimization to local police or camp leaders, stating a fear of repercussions from the perpetrators and a history of inaction by the authorities.
The violence in Cox’s Bazar echoes the violence Rohingya gender minorities were already vulnerable to in Myanmar. A 2019 report published by the United Nations Human Rights Council documented that multiple accounts from transgender women “attested to discrimination and suffering endured as a result of not fitting within societal gender norms and the sex classification ascribed to them at birth. Against this background, transgender people of Rohingya ethnicity are victimized twice: as Rohingya and as transgender people. The result is a tolerance of sexual and gender-based violence that has included rape and other forms of sexual violence.”
The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine state. In August 2017, about 750,000 Rohingyas escaped brutal violence at the hands of the state military, crossing into neighboring Bangladesh where they were housed in sprawling camps. Salma was just 14 at the time.
Nearly one million Rohingya refugees live in these sprawling camps but the number of hijras has never been counted. CNN
The camps are under the authority of the Bangladeshi government’s Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner’s office (RRRC) and are run with the support of the UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR. An interview with UNHCR – to ask whether the agency knows about the transphobic abuse faced by the hijras within the camps and to establish what their role is in protecting this marginalized community – was postponed twice. On one occasion, the agency’s spokesperson in Cox’s Bazar, Shari Yasmin Nijman, said staff were busy responding to a crisis caused by Cyclone Remal in Bangladesh and two devastating fires in the camps. “We won’t have capacity to meet your deadline,” said Nijman on 11 June 2024.
Three weeks later, after once again being approached by CNN, Nijman said: “UNHCR is deeply committed to the protection of all people forced to flee in search of safety, regardless of sex, gender or any other demographic characteristic. We take any occurrence of serious security incidents in the camps, including sexual and gender-based violence, discrimination, and harassment, very seriously.”
Nijman added: “As the Rohingya refugee crisis is now in its seventh year, the protection and other needs of the refugees are immense, while our resources keep declining. UNHCR will continue to work with the Government of Bangladesh, humanitarian partners and the international community to ensure the protection and advocate for durable solutions for all Rohingya refugees.”
The Bangladeshi refugee office (RRRC) did not respond to the questions emailed by CNN. However, an officer at the RRRC, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, said that the institution didn’t even know about the presence of hijras inside the camps and was hearing about allegations of sexual abuse and harassment for the first time from CNN. The officer said that RRRC would look into these accusations. CNN followed up with RRRC but, at the time of publishing, had till not receive a response.
Nearly one million Rohingya refugees now live in a maze of tens of thousands of makeshift tents spread across 33 camps. Conditions are so dire in the settlements that the World Food Programme has described them as “sprawling, chaotic and crowded.”
Here, over 140 local and international non-profits, provide various services including food, healthcare, education, water and sanitation to the Rohingyas. But the Rohingya hijras inside the camps, whose population has never been officially counted, according to RRRC, are largely invisible. One hijra community leader in Cox’s Bazar told CNN that Rohingya hijras numbered in the thousands.
Shyamala Alagendra, an international criminal lawyer and former adviser to the UN who has worked on gender-based violence in the Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar told CNN: “Most of the programs by the humanitarian agencies looking at providing education, sanitation or healthcare support to Rohingyas don’t have a targeted focus on hijra community or separate programs for hijras because they are rarely listed as a vulnerable group. As a result, the community stays neglected.”
The exclusion faced by the hijras CNN spoke to compounds the sexual violence they experience. “If I go to the men’s line, they ask me to leave. If I go to the women’s line, they ask me to leave,” said 21-year-old Jamila, describing her experience of queuing for medical services or rations within the camp. She said she often waits in a corner and only comes forward after everyone else has been attended to.
Rohingya hijras are forced to wear traditionally male clothes to protect themselves from violence inside and outside the camps. CNN
“Whom should I complain to?”
CNN couldn’t locate three of the hijras who were with Salma that night last September when they were ambushed on their way to the wedding, but 20-year-old Laila confirmed that they were abducted and blindfolded that night, and that she too was gang raped.
“They used a knife handle [to rape me],” Laila told CNN, as she nervously clasped and unclasped her hands. “I felt like I will die.” She said she couldn’t walk properly for six months after the incident.
Multiple hijras in Cox’s Bazar told CNN that they are routinely preyed on by gangs. Reporting in February by local newspaper, the Daily Star, identified about ten criminal gangs operating inside the camps, some involved in petty crime and robbery while others kidnapped for ransom and carried out more violent acts.
Presenting in ways traditionally deemed to be feminine puts the hijras at greater risk. Laila talked of being abducted three times by gang members who each time forcibly cut her long hair and beat her for growing it. “They said despite being a man why I was acting like a woman,” she said.
All the hijras CNN interviewed said that they are obliged to wear traditionally male clothes to protect themselves from harassment.
Salma and Laila sitting on a mountain inside Cox’s bazar camp. Rawyan Shayema for CNN
Fear keeps the hijras who’ve been attacked from seeking justice.
“They [the gangs] don’t fear anyone,” Salma said, recounting a time when gang members barged into her home and forcibly took her with them, as her father watched on helplessly. She didn’t report that incident to the local authorities. “The attackers would slit my throat inside my house if I complained.”
Authority figures within the camps provide little safety or comfort, said all the hijras CNN interviewed. Sometimes they are the abusers, said Salma. She told CNN that she was once raped by her block leader, or majhi. (Each of the 33 refugee camps has about 10-12 blocks and each block is headed by a majhi.) Accompanied by her father, they reported the incident to the head of their camp, who, she said, took no action against him. The majhi, Salma said, continues to intimidate her. “I feel very unsafe.”
When CNN contacted the camp leader about the incident, he said he diddn’t remember receiving any such complaint or having ever been approached by any hijras wishing to report sexual abuse.
Multiple hijras told CNN that they often instead turned to a local non-profit for support and safety. The organization, whose name CNN is not revealing for security reasons, works with gender and sexual minorities, providing them with physical and mental healthcare, or a space to simply gather to sing and dance. “Whenever I need medicines, I go there. They treat me properly,” said Laila.
Few NGOs provide hijras with a safe space to gather, sing and dance. CNN
However, Salma alleged that she was sexually harassed by a counselor at the non-profit. She told CNN that during a session with her, he began to touch himself inappropriately. “I felt very uncomfortable, so I stopped sharing my problems with him to quickly wrap up the session and left,” Salma said.
She said she didn’t report the incident to the organization’s leaders, fearing that the counselor would be able to figure out who made the complaint and could harm her. Salma’s friend, Chandni, in whom she confided about the harassment, corroborated her account to CNN.
When CNN raised the allegation with the non-profit, its program coordinator, said: The organization “has a zero-tolerance policy against sexual harassment, abuse, and exploitation in any case, especially involving staff. We will take action if the victim provides us with a written complaint or reports the situation to our committee.” CNN did not hear of other such allegations against the non-profit.
Like so many times before, Salma resigned herself to living with the abuse rather than risking retaliation by confronting her abusers. “I will have to face the counselor if I go there. What do I do?”. Instead, she told CNN, she now keeps a low profile, staying at home as much as she can, confiding in other hijras, hoping that at some point she’d be able to live in “a safe place where people wouldn’t harm me, and I can sleep and eat peacefully”.
“We only share our pain with fellow hijras,” Salma said. “Normal people don’t understand us.”
As for the police, Khandakar Fazle Rabbi, superintendent of a battalion that has jurisdiction across 11 camps including Laila’s and Salma’s, told CNN that his office has not received any formal complaints of harassment against hijras. “Upholding the safety and security of Rohingya residents remains our paramount concern, and we remain committed to promptly addressing any concerns or threats they may face,” said Rabbi. He later told CNN that following his interview, he visited the camps and met with hijras, assuring them that they could fearlessly report any violence they face to his office.
