Cambodia struggles with domestic-violence tradition

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Joel Brinkley
Sunday, July 26, 2009

Phnom Penh, Cambodia --

Ing Kantha Phavi is an impressive woman. She's a medical doctor, a specialist in tropical diseases, but also Cambodia's minister of women's affairs.

Male-hierarchical societies dominate Asia, and Cambodia is no exception. In this region, women's affairs offices are generally showpiece ministries.

Presidents and prime ministers parade their women's affairs ministers before visiting Western leaders as unconvincing demonstrations of their interest in gender equality.


If Ing were the sort of person who could accept that, her ministry would fit nicely into this paradigm. But she's not. Still, her challenges are Herculean. As she told an interviewer last year: "When you come up against these male dinosaurs, do you sometimes feel like giving up? I feel like giving up always." Nonetheless, four years ago, she pushed a bill through the national assembly that, for the first time, made it illegal for men to beat their wives and children. Domestic violence is an endemic problem here. Arguing for the legislation then, she cited statistics showing that almost one-quarter of the nation's women are beaten or otherwise abused by their husbands - sometimes even murdered. But that's a family matter, the male legislators argued. Why are you bringing us another one of those liberal Western fads? "They treated me like a revolutionary," she said.

After voting it down once, the legislators finally approved the domestic violence bill in 2005. But now, four years later, domestic violence in Cambodian society has increased. Ing and others now talk about one-third of the nation's women being victims. One woman out of three - one of the highest rates in the world.

Some of this violence is positively grisly; Cambodia remains an extraordinarily violent nation. Consider a couple of recent news stories from local media:

-- "A man has confessed to pouring gasoline on his fiancée and her sister and burning them at their home in Cambodia's northwestern Battambang province, authorities here say, amid what the government describes as a worsening pattern of violence against women."

-- Also in Battambang, "Police say they are searching for a man who beat his wife unconscious in an argument over $50, and then killed his brother-in-law when he tried to intervene."

After the government enacted the domestic violence law, it never wrote the enabling regulations, nor instructed police and prosecutors to enforce it. That happens often here when the government is pressured to enact laws it doesn't really like. "I admit that it was never implemented," Ing told me. "We have a lot of good laws. The problem is the enforcement of the laws."

The problem is also history - centuries of subservience and docility. Nothing embodies this more than the Chbab Srey, a piece of Cambodian traditional "literature" that describes a woman's place in the home, written in the form of a mother talking to her daughter. One passage says: "Dear, no matter what your husband did wrong, I tell you to be patient, don't say anything ... don't curse, don't be the enemy. No matter how poor or stupid, you don't look down on him. ... No matter what the husband says, angry and cursing, using strong words without ending, complaining and cursing because he is not pleased, you should be patient with him and calm down your anger."

For as long as anyone can remember, this homespun advice, pulled together into a small booklet, was required reading in the nation's school. Most every literate adult remembers reading it.

"It's not law, it's tradition," Im Sethy, the education minister, insisted. "It was taught as literature" until just two years ago, when the women's affairs ministry finally managed to have it pulled from the schools' curriculum.

In much of the world, women are second-class citizens, at best. In parts of the Arab world, that is legislated; Islamic law, followed in most Arab nations, places women in subservient roles.

In Asia, gender discrimination is generally the result of cultural norms, not legislative mandates. As an example, Ing noted that, while the Chbab Srey was pulled from the schools in 2007, "it is still followed in rural areas." But then, 80 percent of this nation's population is rural. Traditions, she lamented, are quite difficult to reverse. So are psychological paradigms. "It is well known," she noted, "that children who grow up in a home with domestic violence are likely to commit domestic violence themselves. The next generation will be the same. "So the way to cut this vicious cycle is to cut into domestic violence now."

For this country, a tall order.

Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University. To comment, e-mail

brinkley@foreign-matters.com. Contact us at forum@sfchronicle.com.