Stepping through the doorway of the building, the blazing heat and blaring noise from the street outside immediately fades into the background.
An overhead fan gently cools the room, which is decorated in a cheerful patchwork of pink and orange material. On the walls hang drawings and educational posters and the floor is covered in embroidered cushions and carpets that make the whole space feel inviting and homely.
This is one of the women-and-girls’ safe spaces run by CARE Bangladesh in the largest refugee camp in the world, situated in the Cox’s Bazar coastal district of Bangladesh.
Cox’s Bazar Refugee Camp
What is referred to as Cox’s Bazar refugee camp actually consists of 33 camps covering 24 square kilometres, making it one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Cox’s Bazar hosts around a million Rohingya refugees who are persecuted in their homeland of Myanmar.
After a brutal crackdown by the Myanmar military in 2017, a huge wave of Rohingya fled across the border into neighbouring Bangladesh. Unable to go back home, and unable to apply for citizenship in Bangladesh, the Rohingya rely entirely on NGOs and government-funded aid for their survival. The refugee camp, due to its location, is extremely vulnerable to monsoon rains, landslides and cyclones.
Shantikhana: places of peace
Against this backdrop, CARE runs women-and-girls’ safe spaces in four camps in Cox’s Bazar. Women refer to these spaces as ‘Shantikhana’ (‘places of peace’), and they serve many different functions. Aside from being places women can retreat to, livelihood initiatives also take place in the safe spaces, with women and girls learning to sew and make handicrafts as well as learning basic life skills such as literacy and arithmetic. Additionally, CARE runs awareness sessions here, as Bilkish Begum, Gender and Protection Coordinator for CARE Bangladesh explains:
"The facilities are acting as a space where women are being empowered. They learn a lot in the centre, they now know what gender-based violence, child marriage, polygamy and gender norms are through educational sessions held there."
Bilkish explains that because the volunteers who run the space are recruited from the Rohingya community, the sessions are often delivered to women by women from their own community. She goes on to recall some of the challenges they had when first establishing the spaces in 2017, which were initially met with some suspicion by the community and religious leaders. But over time, and with household visits and community awareness sessions, the spaces are now accepted and even supported by most in the camps.
Gaining women and girls’ perspectives
In October 2024, CARE International UK and CARE Bangladesh ran a series of workshops with women and girls in Cox’s Bazar camps 11,12,13 and 16. The workshops focused on understanding their perspective on their shelters and the wider impact living in them was having on their lives. As part of these workshops, we also asked women and girls about other spaces they could access in the camps, and what role these places played in their lives.
Workshop participants consistently told us that their homes, made primarily of tarpaulin and bamboo, were hot, cramped and afforded them no privacy. In this context, the value of accessing women-and-girls' safe spaces became a particularly poignant topic to come out of these workshops.
On one particularly hot and humid afternoon, we were able to run a workshop inside one of the safe spaces with a group of adolescent girls. The eleven girls who gathered were all aged between 11 and 17. They were giggly and a little shy to begin with, but relaxed during the first activity as they drew the things they loved to do in their favourite spaces.
The space featured in many of their drawings. One girl explained that the tiny, two room shelter her and the six members of her family stay in is too crowded and hot for her and her friends to gather in, and so the safe space serves as an important social space for them. Another girl described how she loves to relax here by making handicrafts, stitching flowers on to cloth and making beautiful patterns with the sewing machine.
For women and girls, the camp offers few spaces where they can enjoy privacy or escape from the constant and extreme humidity and heat. The men and boys tend to leave their small shelters during the day and can roam freely or meet in the teashops. For women and girls, this is not seen as culturally acceptable, and so they are largely confined to their shelters.
The girls explain that this has been exacerbated by the rise in gang violence in recent months, and so they are increasingly being kept at home by concerned family members. The Shantikana are cool, and they can hang beautiful drawings on the walls, in the absence of having their own rooms at home to decorate.
Above all, the girls can be themselves here, away from the challenges and pressures of the camp outside.
A place of self expression
This is a space where the girls can express things that seem impossible elsewhere in the camp. Whilst we chat, one girl called Anjuma shyly shows us her drawing, and explains that her biggest dream would be to one day play football with other girls somewhere in the camp. There is excited laughter at this and the girls all begin talking at once about different types of sport they would like to play.
Anjuma is a little older than the rest of the girls, and she explains to me that now she is 17, her family prefers her to stay mostly at home, so she does not attend school anymore. Her mother, who she is very close to, worries about her safety as a young girl around the camp. The safe space is the one place she still attends regularly outside her home. It’s where she sees friends, makes handicrafts and talks about her dreams of playing football in the future.
Anjuma’s mother is happy for her to attend these female only spaces, and it is clear the Shantikhana is so much more than just an alternative shelter for a girl like Anjuma. It is a source of happiness, personal expression and freedom.
Photography in Cox’s Bazar
The photographer for all the images in this article is a volunteer from the Rohingya community who supported us throughout the fieldwork. Her name is Ishrat Bibi and she is part of a collective of award-winning Rohingya photographers documenting life in Cox’s Bazar: www.rohingyatographer.org
