Life inside the sprawling camps of Rohingya women in Bangladesh often feels like living in a cage — crowded bamboo-and-tarpaulin shelters stacked against each other, limited food, no privacy, and an almost total lack of contact with the outside world. Beyond the barbed fences and physical barriers lies another, more insidious isolation: digital silence. Without connection, many Rohingya women experience a form of enforced invisibility worse than any physical wall — a silence that deepens their suffering and cuts off the faintest hope of escape.
As of 2025, Bangladesh is hosting roughly 1,156,001 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. Among them, around 52 percent are children and about half of the remainder are women and girls — meaning that an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 women and girls are living in camps like those in Cox’s Bazar and Bhasan Char.
In Cox’s Bazar, the largest refugee camp in the world, there are no cellphone towers, and refugees are regularly denied legal SIM cards because they lack a Bangladeshi national identity card, as confirmed in a recent report by the Diplomat. Even the formally issued cards from UNHCR — meant to help them claim rations — do nothing to restore meaningful connectivity. Reliance on informal SIMs is common, but that exposes women to harassment, confiscation, or extortion.
Electricity is equally scarce; many households depend on modest solar panels, yet the charge seldom suffices. When solar fails, women queue to charge phones using host-community connections — paying about 20 taka (roughly $0.16) per session, more during rainy season. Even on good months, a data pack costs around 500 taka (≈ $4), an impossible expense when a family’s entire monthly aid hovers near 11,000 taka (≈ $14). As a result, only about 30 percent of young Rohingya women ever own or use a smartphone.
This digital deprivation compounds deeper vulnerabilities. As one woman from Rakhine State recalled, internet shutdowns have repeatedly become the norm — especially during waves of violence in Myanmar. Without connectivity, rumors spread unchecked, access to information is blocked, and the few lifelines of external news, legal aid or community organising remain out of reach.
On top of these restrictions, the physical conditions in the camps are bleak. Overcrowding, inadequate shelter, scarce access to clean water and sanitation, limited healthcare — these are daily realities. Humanitarian services — already fragile — are collapsing under funding cuts. In 2025 alone, food rations have been halved. A survey by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in late 2025 paints a grim picture: among refugees in the camps, 58 percent say they feel unsafe, and 56 percent report increasing difficulty accessing healthcare. Feeling unsafe is not merely political — it is existential. Fires, often sparked by fragile fuel supplies or cooking accidents, remain a constant danger. In past years, fires consumed thousands of shelters and displaced tens of thousands more.
For women, the fear is layered: they worry not just about fire or floods, but about sexual violence, exploitation, child marriage, deepening dependency — all within a context of almost total powerlessness. Without stable housing, reliable nutrition, or external lines of communication, they are essentially trapped.
Religion and culture — central to Rohingya identity — add another dimension of constraint. Rohingya are a Muslim minority from Myanmar’s historically marginalized Rakhine State. Persecution and statelessness have long deprived them of legal recognition, full citizenship, and access to basic rights like education, employment or social mobility. In Bangladesh’s refugee camps, traditional gender norms often intensify: women are expected to remain within the confines of family and community, with little opportunity to venture outside or seek support beyond their tents.
In this cultural and religious context, digital and physical isolation combine to strip Rohingya women of autonomy. The refugee camps, designed as temporary shelters, never evolved into self-sustaining communities. Instead, the lack of infrastructure — sanctioned by political design — reinforces a permanent limbo.
These women live beneath multiple layers of marginalization: first as refugees denied citizenship, then as stateless Muslims in exile, and finally as women confined by cultural norms and structural deprivation. Their stories rarely reach beyond the camps’ fence lines. The global framing of “digital freedom” falls short when fundamental access is denied — and for Rohingya women, such denial isn’t just about smartphones, it’s about dignity, memory, community, and survival.
With aid dwindling, food scarce and danger omnipresent, these women face a fate that is silent, unseen, and largely ignored. Yet their resilience endures — hidden beneath a digital blackout, waiting perhaps for a moment when the world chooses to look not just at numbers, but at faces, names and voices.
I have seen those camps. Not on Google Maps, not through a polite UN slideshow, not filtered through donor-friendly language. I have stood near Sittwe, in Rakhine State, where Rohingya women and children were penned behind checkpoints like contagious animals. I have walked Cox’s Bazar, where the “world’s largest refugee camp” is marketed as a humanitarian achievement when it is, in truth, an open-air warehouse for abandoned human beings. Hell on Earth is not a metaphor here. It is dust, heat, fear, smoke, hunger, and silence — especially for women, girls and children.
Let’s call things by their name. This is one of the most obscene achievements of Myanmar’s generals: the systemic erasure of an entire people, executed with bureaucratic precision and dressed up as “security operations”. The Rohingya did not vanish. They were pushed, beaten, raped, burned, terrorised — and then stored. Out of sight, out of conscience. Ethnic cleansing without the inconvenience of body counts on Western television screens.
And yes, the camps are hell — but hell has layers. For Rohingya women, every layer is heavier. Sexual violence did not end at the border. It mutated. It became confinement, forced dependence, child marriage as “protection”, exploitation by traffickers, abuse hidden behind bamboo walls. Add pregnancy, menstruation, childbirth without adequate medical care, and you begin to understand why survival itself becomes an act of resistance.
What makes this even more grotesque is the second crime layered on top of the first: the civilized world’s dereliction of duty. Not ignorance — dereliction. Governments know. Aid agencies know. Diplomats sip bad coffee in air-conditioned offices and say “repatriation” with straight faces while women in the camps cannot legally own a SIM card, cannot phone a sister, cannot call for help when the fire starts or the gang comes at night. Digital blackout is not a technical problem; it is political suffocation.
We love to say “Never Again”. We said it after the Holocaust, after Bosnia, after Rwanda. Apparently, “Never Again” expires quickly when the victims are Muslim, stateless, female, poor, and inconvenient. Myanmar’s generals should be in The Hague. Instead, they attend regional meetings. Bangladesh, overwhelmed and underfunded, is left to manage a crisis it did not create. And the rest of us? We fund just enough tarpaulin to keep the horror going quietly.
Do not tell me this is complicated. Genocide is simple. Abandonment is simpler. What is truly complex is the moral acrobatics required to look at Rohingya women raising children in cages and still call ourselves a civilized world.
History will not be kind. And she will remember the women first.