Female Migration and Stay-Behind Children in Bangladesh

Abstract

In migration studies, male migrants and their stay-behind families, including women and children have been an area of sustained academic investigation in the Global South. The unaccompanied children of female migrants remain, however, an area of peripheral interest in the existing literature. Millions of South Asian female migrants work in two major destination regions: the GCC countries and Southeast Asia. They are often married with children and their traditional role as mothers is transferred to and executed by other members of the extended family, giving rise to an exciting area of migration research in the global South in general and in South Asia in particular. This paper attempts to address this relatively under-studied field of South-South migration by investigating the stay-behind families of female migrants in Bangladesh with a focus on their unaccompanied children.