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While domestic violence and forced eviction are significant issues for women in their own right, Home SOS contends that, taken together, they most clearly and definitively demonstrate the gendered contingency of existence in contemporary Cambodia. Situating the book as a feminist geography intervention with broader (inter)disciplinary significance, I venture that both are acts of gender‐based violence. Gender‐based violence is defined as ‘violence which is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately’ (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 1992, np). This includes acts that inflict physical, mental, or sexual harm or suffering, the threat of such acts, coercion, and other deprivations of liberty (CEDAW 1992).

Domestic violence is a well‐known form of gender‐based violence that encompasses violence against women by an intimate partner and/or other family members, wherever this takes place, and in whatever form, be this physical, sexual, psychological, or economic. Adult women account for the vast majority of domestic violence victims globally. The insidious nature of domestic violence in Cambodia was first highlighted by inaugural research conducted in the mid‐1990s by the Project Against Domestic Violence with 1374 women (Nelson and Zimmerman 1996). The study found that 16% of women surveyed reported physical abuse by their spouses and 8% acquired injuries mostly to the head. More recently, a nationally representative Partners for Prevention (P4P) (2013) study showed that one in four women (25.3%) in Cambodia had experienced in their lifetime at least one act of physical or sexual violence, or both, perpetrated by an intimate partner. Figures published in the country’s National Survey on Women’s Health and Life Experiences (MOWA 2015) report too that approximately one in five women (between 15 and 64 years old) who had ever been in a relationship had experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner at least once in their lifetime. Further to this, three out of four women who had experienced physical and/or sexual violence had encountered severe acts of violence that were likely to cause injury. These include being hit with a fist or something that could hurt; dragged, kicked, or beaten up; threatened or hurt by a gun, knife, or other weapon. The survey also found that women are much more likely to experience frequent acts of violence rather than one‐off incidents. Domestic violence occurrence is not an isolated event, but is a pattern of violative behaviour that women encounter. This includes emotional abuse, with almost one in three (32%) of ‘ever‐partnered’ women aged 15–64 in Cambodia reporting controlling behaviour and/or the threat of harm (MOWA 2015).

In contrast to domestic violence, it is unusual that forced eviction is explicitly framed as gender‐based violence. Forced eviction is viewed as a widespread and systematic human rights violation in Cambodia but is rarely discussed as gender‐based violence. Cambodia is infamous for the scale and brutality of forced evictions occurring in, and beyond, Phnom Penh under the auspices of development. According to WITNESS (2017), at least 30 000 residents of the capital city, Phnom Penh, have been forcibly evicted, and approximately 150 000 Cambodians throughout the country are at risk of forced eviction. Underscoring the magnitude of the issue, between January 2000 and March 2014, the human rights LICADHO (2014a) documented more than 500 000 Cambodians affected by state‐involved land conflicts in investigations covering roughly half the country.

Kaori Izumi’s (2007, p. 12) writing on Southern and East Africa was, until recently, rare in its direct contention that forced eviction ‘represents a form of gender‐based violence in itself, as well as often being accompanied by other acts of extreme violence against women, including physical abuse, harassment, and intimidation, in violation of women’s human rights’. A United Nations (2014a, p. 16) fact sheet on forced eviction now acknowledges that, ‘women often tend to be disproportionately affected and bear the brunt of abuse during forced evictions’. Furthermore, it affirms that forced eviction commonly entails ‘direct and indirect violence against women before, during and after the event’.³ Forced eviction hurts in multiple senses, but is particularly traumatic for women given its targeting of the domestic sphere. As Yorm Bopha, an interviewee activist evocatively told me,

My message is that home is life for women. Even the bird needs a nest. Even corpses need a cemetery. The most important place is home. If we do not have a home, how can we bring up our children?

The point that Yorm Bopha is making is that every woman needs somewhere either to nurture new life or rest their deceased bodies. Forced eviction, however, is a form of gender‐based violence that reduces and unravels women’s capacity to fulfil social reproductive roles that many women value. Although scholastic work collectively evidences the gendered dimensions of displacement (see Brickell and Speer 2020 for a review), Home SOS strengthens the case for viewing forced eviction more specifically, and emphatically, as a form of gender‐based violence like domestic violence. The book reveals women’s feminised responsibility to deal with the far‐reaching and adverse consequences of forced eviction, from possible destruction of the family home, splintering of familial and/or community ties, the loss of livelihood, and access to essential facilities and services. These carry with them significant physical and mental burdens. As UN‐HABITAT (2011a, pp. 3–4) notes and Home SOS demonstrates, ‘the prospect of being forcibly evicted can be so terrifying that it is not uncommon for people to risk their lives in an attempt to resist or, even more extreme, to take their own lives when it becomes apparent that the eviction cannot be prevented’.

On these grounds, it is largely women who have been at the forefront of contestations over displacement globally (Casolo and Doshi 2013) and this resistance is part of the survival-work that women are undertaking. While displacement challenges the displaced ‘to take their proper place [of non‐being] instead of taking place’ (Butler and Athanasiou 2013, p. 20), ‘emplacement’ (Roy 2017) as a tactic is one way that women contest the removal of their homes. The book shows, however, how these emplacement efforts are mired in gender‐based violence, including state‐sponsored violence against women, domestic violence, and women’s incarceration as part‐and‐parcel of their fight for home. Direct and indirect violences are therefore inflicted physically and mentally upon women disproportionately, and this includes other deprivations of liberty that fit the definitional contours of gender‐based violence. That forced eviction has been excluded from the gender‐based violence radar is highly political and likely to be because it raises the spectre of complicit governments and a development model driven by capitalist dynamics and state accumulation tied to the seizing of homes at any human cost.

Indeed, seminal feminist scholarship conjectures that an indelible link exists between ‘the global extension of capitalist relations and the escalation of violence against women, as the punishment against their resistance to the appropriation of their bodies and labour’ (Federici 2014, p. xi). Prompted by Silvia Federici’s work, Sutapa Chattopadhyay (2018, p. 1296) asks, ‘how can women’s vulnerability to gender‐based violence be explained through numerous co‐constitutive forms of violence and inequalities that shape the bodies of the marginalized?’ Home SOS places the experiences of domestic violence and forced eviction centrefold in order to examine women’s injuries, but also their survival practices, in defence of home. It therefore works to connect rather than isolate different forms of gender‐based violence in its co‐constitutive analysis of violences and inequalities shaping women’s lives.