MAY 2021 Preventing a silent crisis for Rohingya women and girls during COVID-19 pandemic The Rohingya refugees10 living in Cox’s Bazar refugee camps in Bangladesh and Bangladeshi families living near the settlement are just as worried about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as other people around the world. The camps are home to some 850,000 Rohingya refugees displaced from neighbouring Myanmar. They worry that the health system in an already poor area will be unable to cope with a rapidly spreading virus. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is supporting interventions in Cox’s Bazar District to aid Rohingya and Bangladeshi families. While the nationwide lockdown in Bangladesh, which began in March, is bringing an all-too-familiar economic shock to already impoverished communities, the requirement to stay home is causing anxiety for some refugees that has little to do with COVID-19 itself. With the lockdown, UNICEF anticipated an increase in gender-based violence (GBV), especially intimate partner violence, sexual exploitation and other abuse of women and girls. GBV had the potential to become a silent crisis. The vast majority of all reports of GBV in the Rohingya refugee camps in 2019 were made by women, and the incidents generally occurred inside the home of either the survivor or the perpetrator. In either case, other family members were typically present in the home, which points to another layer of threat: the psychological impact on children and adolescents who witness the violence. To meet the need for protection and services, UNICEF supports 15 Safe Spaces for Women and Girls in Cox’s Bazar District to provide group counselling, skills training, literacy sessions, psychosocial support and case management. The services are available for Rohingya and Bangladeshi women and girls who are vulnerable to and/or are survivors of GBV, trafficking, child marriage and other harmful practices. But the nationwide lockdown, and the closure of ‘non-essential’ services, meant the safe spaces had to be temporarily shuttered – they could not operate the way they used to. 10 About 1.6 million Rohingya, a minority group from Myanmar, have been forcibly displaced across Asia and the Pacific region as of mid-2020. Myanmar’s discriminatory citizenship laws have stripped nearly all Rohingya of their citizenship, making them the largest identified stateless community in the world. UNHCR has registered almost one million Rohingya refugees and asylum-seekers, mainly in Bangladesh (860,000), Malaysia (101,000) and India (18,000), as well as smaller numbers in Indonesia, Nepal, Thailand, and other countries. An estimated 600,000 Rohingya continue to remain in Rakhine State, Myanmar, of whom 142,000 are internally displaced. 7