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Home SOS brings together original data from four studies I have undertaken. Over the 16‐year collection period (2003–2019), my work has shifted from the broad‐based focus of my doctorate (Brickell 2007) on household gender relations and marriage to a more concentrated engagement on domestic violence and forced eviction issues. This work began in Siem Reap Province and has since extended to Pursat Province and Phnom Penh, the country’s capital.

The fieldwork for my PhD (2004–2005) was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and was undertaken in the urban centre of tourist‐oriented Siem Reap (Slorkram commune), home to the global heritage and tourist site of Angkor. Here female participants worked in low‐paying service sector positions or were engaged in the home‐based selling of soup and refreshments. The other fieldsite was located in its rural vicinity where rice farming still predominated (Krobei Riel commune) and where women were mainly subsistence farmers and weavers.⁴ The research was based on 100 oral histories and 40 semi‐structured interviews. The sample of interviewees was based on an equal proportion of men and women of differing ages living in the two communes. Participants were sought through visits on different days and times to randomly selected individual households in the two communes. Unlike the semi‐structured interviews, the oral histories were completed in two sessions (lasting between two to four hours each) and were used to understand transitions over the life course given the shifting expectations, responsibilities, and attitudes tied to the roles of men and women in and outside the household. These were ordinarily carried out in participants’ homes out of the sun and, given their length, women sometimes undertook piecework or housework. A profile was also used to gather background socioeconomic information about respondents and their respective households. In total, during my doctoral research, I interviewed 19 women in Slorkram and 5 women in Krobei Riel who had directly experienced marital breakdown, the majority of whom had encountered domestic violence in their spousal relationship(s). This included Orm, whose life story had a profound influence on the development of my research trajectory and this book.

My first encounter with Orm came across the metallic countertop of her sugar cane juice stall positioned outside her house in Slorkram Commune, Siem Reap (Figure 1.2). She had lived there with her two young daughters for 4 years. Sipping the sweet liquid she had just squeezed through her press, we went on to spend several hours together talking. The joyous shrieks of the boys jumping in the river behind us felt in stark relief to the sombre tone of her voice as it began to crack in this initial interview. Surrounded by photographs of her standing alone, Orm quickly started telling me about the social discrimination she encountered as a divorcee, and the extreme depression that resulted. This extended to anxiety‐induced weight loss and the attritional wearing down of her body in response.⁵ Her mood was bleak and her failed marriages inflected with sadness and worry that had become an affective presence in her life.

Figure 1.2 Orm’s sugar cane juice stall outside her home, Siem Reap, 2004.

Photo: Katherine Brickell.

Orm’s interview revealed the reluctance to talk publicly about her circumstances on the basis of perceived guilt, which upholds the idea that women should not take fire outside the house, but let it smoulder inside. Crises should, by this prevailing logic, be contained as internal domestic affairs and not leaked into the public sphere. What was also telling for me in Orm’s interview was how the failings of her intimate relationships and her insecure tenure status residing on the riverbank without legal title (Figure 1.3) compounded her overarching sense of precarity and outsider status. Much like the language used to describe the history and circumstances of her intimate relationships, she explained that she had no choice but to ‘bear living here’. Orm was deeply unhappy because she did not know if and when the land would be confiscated and frequently noted her constant fear of her eviction ‘being soon’. Earning only 40 US dollars per month and living alone without a partner, she noted that there was little way of turning her life chances around. This slow and anticipatory emergency was never far from her mind. Crisis had an omni‐presence in her life history that she keenly detected.

Figure 1.3 Exterior of Orm’s home, Siem Reap, 2004.

Photo: Katherine Brickell.

Orm’s interview impressed upon me the toll that the responsibility of managing the crisis ordinary people can have, and how this weight is linked memories and experiences of the past. When fantasies of ‘the good life’ become untenable (Berlant 2011), as they had for Orm, a sense of crisis can pervade to such an extent that life feels hopeless. Orm describes that she ‘can only hold the pain in my chest’ and feels that ‘trouble’ was ‘accumulating continuously’ in her life. This inability to move forward positively in life, the sheer relentlessness of issues amassing, and the quotidian internalisation of this harm, is etched into the crisis ordinary. To escape it, suicide is one route Orm contemplated. The only thing deterring her suicide was concern for her children’s well‐being. Orm had lost both her parents when she was a child during the Khmer Rouge regime and after being forcibly displaced to Battambang Province lived with her grandmother before she was also killed. Moved regularly across the country, Orm variously laboured on rice fields, broke up termite mounds, and built irrigation channels, all under the regime’s orders. She did not wish her daughters to be orphaned as she had. In her first marriage, she explained that her husband’s parents did not accept her because she was an orphan. Often, she said, looking down, ‘they didn’t allow me to sleep inside with my husband, closing the door on me’ and forcing her to sleep outside. Orm’s desire for home and acceptance had once again been stymied.

For Orm, the ensuing crisis was not only an event but felt like ‘an enduring condition of life’ (Roitman 2013, p. 2) that she could not escape however hard she tried. This is in large part because of the normative ideals and constraints to which she felt held as a Cambodian woman who should be happily married and living in a stable conjugal home. In Cambodia these seemed available only to certain populations she was stigmatised by, and excluded from, on moral and financial grounds. That crisis ‘entails reference to a norm’ (Roitman 2013, p. 4) was especially pertinent to Orm’s gendered story of the crisis ordinary.

My doctoral research provided the basis for a project four years later on marital dissolution, an issue of intimate significance to Orm and several other women I had met during my PhD research. Supported by a Royal Geographical Society small grant, I returned to the rural Krobei Riel commune in 2011. There I carried out a total of 22 in‐depth interviews with ever‐abandoned, separated, or divorced women.⁶ During the month‐long research, all women from the commune who were identified by village‐level leaders as falling into the aforementioned categories were interviewed through this targeted sample approach. Working across this range of statuses was important in a country where marriage and its end can take multiple forms. The 2005 Cambodian Demographic Health Survey (National Institute of Public Health et al. 2006, p. 266) suggests that only one‐third of ever‐married women (652) canvased (2162) had signed a contract in front of commune authorities.⁷ Research by Robin Biddulph (2011) on what are termed ‘de facto marriages’ suggests that whilst couples apply for permission from the commune and follow formal public announcement guidelines, they do not complete the registration process at the commune to gain marriage certification. Whilst not legally verifiable, these marriages are based on community recognition and also on family books compiled and issued by local authorities. As Mehrvar, Sore, and Sambath (2008, pp. 14–15) have stated in their work on land rights in Cambodia, ‘Most women interviewed did not understand the difference between divorce in a legally registered marriage and an agreement between parties to dissolve traditional marriage (separation).’ Consequently, despite a decision from the court being required for a ‘formal divorce’ in cases of legally registered marriages, they found official court decisions for divorce to be extremely rare.

Given this complex legal picture of marital dissolution, a profile form was again used to collect data on marital status, age, household structure pre‐ and post‐breakdown(s) (including intermediary arrangements), and engagement in paid work (again with notes to any changes). The women ranged in age between 24 and 48 years old. Whilst the project predominantly focused on Krobei Riel, I also spent time attempting (largely in vain) to relocate the 19 women who had experienced marital breakdown identified in my doctoral research in the Slorkram commune. I did, however, manage to successfully recontact and re‐interview Orm with the help of a photograph I had kept from seven years prior.

Orm had moved further down river to allow for what she was briefed as bridge widening works. Despite Orm’s tumultuous relationship history, out of stigma and shame, mixed with a desire for emotional and financial support, Orm had also recently remarried. Yet this change in her marital status had not removed the need for survival-work to support her family and she again felt ‘as usual’ depended upon rather than being depended for. Describing being ‘looked down’ upon and ‘scorned’, her decision to remarry was in part influenced by her ‘out of place’ status. Orm’s reluctant choices emerged from her attempts to conform to acceptable Khmer womanhood. In this sense, symbolic dimensions of marital dissolution – in which discrimination plays a part – are shown to directly shape decision‐making processes. The ‘choice’ to remarry becomes a tool to regain status, acceptance, and self‐confidence at the same time as familial stability and happiness.⁸ Prevailing gender norms are important factors to understanding the ‘home unmaking’ (Baxter and Brickell 2014) and remaking practices of Cambodian women who have experienced marital breakdown (Brickell 2011). They are in one sense contradictory, limiting the agency of women, to challenge the spectre of violence they encounter in cases of domestic violence and forced eviction. Yet, as Orm’s marital manoeuvres testify, they can provide a form of moral legitimacy and protection that women mobilise in situations of discrimination.

A year later after I conducted this research, and having re‐met Orm, I began leading a study (2012–2015) joint funded by the ESRC and Department for International Development (DFID) entitled ‘Lay and Institutional Knowledges of Domestic Violence Law: Towards Active Citizenship in Rural and Urban Cambodia’. It explored the (in)efficacies of the country’s first ever DV law, ‘The Law on the Prevention of Domestic Violence and the Protection of Victims’ (Royal Government of Cambodia (RGC) 2005) (see Figure 1.4). Each research element was conducted in eight communes divided equally between urban and rural environs of two provinces – Pursat and Siem Reap (including Slorkram commune in which I had undertaken my prior research). In early 2013, the qualitative research was conducted that forms the backbone of the domestic violence (DV) data I engage with in the book. It included 40 interviews with female DV victims (identified by NGOs and community authorities), 40 with an equal proportion of male and female householders (approached randomly), and a final 40 with a range of different stakeholders who had an occupational investment in DV reduction. This latter sample included legal professionals, NGO workers, police officers, and other authority and religious leaders. The viewpoints of such stakeholders are a distinctive and necessary feature of the empirical chapters that follow. They help ‘to reveal specific features of contentious politics in the terrain of law, since as an “institutional environment” law makes mediators and translators crucial to the activation of a politics of rights’ (Woodman 2011, p. 190). Their professional behaviour and conduct also sends out powerful wider messages to victims, offenders, and the wider society about the prospects of women gaining justice (Briones‐Vozmodiano et al 2014; Lila, Gracia, and Gracia 2013). In January 2019 I undertook follow‐up meetings with key stakeholder organisations in Phnom Penh.

Figure 1.4 Domestic violence law poster in Pursat Province, 2013.

Photo: Katherine Brickell.⁹

These three projects featured in Home SOS are joined by a fourth, on forced eviction. The need for this research became more pressing over time as I undertook the other studies. Forced eviction was a human rights violation, which was becoming ever more present across Cambodia. It was also something that Orm spoke to me about previously in the 2011 study on marital dissolution in Siem Reap. In 2013, I returned to Siem Reap to re‐connect with Orm once again. I could not find her, however, and her riverside home had disappeared. The year prior, nearly 400 families had been evicted from their homes in the Slorkram commune of the city. Authorities had justified the evictions to develop, further widen the river, and make new communal gardens (Transterra Media 2012). Despite being told that they had until 1 April 2012 to move, on 27 March a large police force arrived in the early morning and demanded families and businesses leave immediately (Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5 Slorkram river community before (26 March) and after (27 March) the eviction, Siem Reap, 2012.

Source: Courtesy of Philippe Ceulen.

Orm’s home had been displaced several times; its fixity to the river bank had gradually been unstitched until it was gone. The fire that tore through it was deliberately ignited to remove every trace of familial life once lived on Siem Reap’s river banks. It was the end point of an attritional war waged by provincial authorities to make room for more ‘profitable’ uses. Described as a ‘sore sight for tourist eyes’, the river ‘clean up’ (Sokha 2006) was justified to help beautify the city, the economy of which is driven by international tourists visiting the archaeological ruins of Angkor close by.

The spectre of forced eviction and the eradicative violence that accompanied it, also revealed fault lines that were hard to ignore and compelled the twin study of domestic violence and forced eviction. Their juxtaposition was something I kept on returning to in my thinking. While the passing of DV law suggested a political willingness, of sorts, to tackle this type of violence against women through ‘rule of law’, the Cambodian government were concurrently using ‘rule by law’ against women contesting forced eviction on the streets of the country’s capital (see Chapter 6 for a discussion of these distinctions). 2011 saw the escalation of violences in, and politically motivated charges against, the Boeung Kak Lake (BKL) community of Phnom Penh and women in particular. Law and violence had an intimate relationship in Cambodia and was one I felt needed exploring. Over the years, spending more time in Phnom Penh for the DV law study interviewing NGOs and policymakers, I took the opportunity to visit BKL in 2012 and then to start new work there. This fieldwork was carried out in 2013 and 2014.

Garnering both national and international attention, BKL is perhaps the most widely known case of forced eviction, and collective resistance to it, in Cambodia. The controversial project involved the eviction of families living around the lake over many years in central Phnom Penh (see Chapter 4 for more information; Nam 2011 on its history and Kent 2016 on recent events there). As the United Nations General Assembly (2012, p. 8) note, ‘The case is emblematic of the desperation that communities throughout Cambodia feel in resolving their land disputes, and the ensuing civil unrest.’ To understand forced eviction as an embodied, located, and grounded phenomenon, in‐depth interviews were conducted with 15 women from BKL who had either been forcibly evicted and/or who had become active participants in protest in 2013. In addition to these interviews, material was gained via audio‐recorded tours (Figure 1.6) with some of the women as well as more informal ‘hanging out’ at the women’s advocacy centre. All the women chose to be identified using their real names: Kong Chantha, Bo Chhorvy, Phan Chhunreth, Nget Khun, Ngoun Kimlang, Soy Kolap, Srei Leap, Heng Mom, Van My, Sear Naret, Srei Pov, Soung Samai, Phorn Sophea, Srei Touch, and Tep Vanny. Given the government’s intensified clamping down on freedom of speech and willingness to incarcerate BKL women in recent years since, I have not used their specific names where I refer to any direct criticism of government party members.

Figure 1.6 Audio‐taped tour of Boeung Kak by residents, 2013.

Photo: Katherine Brickell.

A further five interviews in 2013 were conducted with women living in Trapaing Anhchanh, a resettlement community made up of evicted residents from the ‘Cambodia Railway Rehabilitation Project’.¹⁰ These are featured in Chapter 4 using pseudonyms. In 2014 I returned to interview three BKL women, Tep Vanny and Srei Leap, who I had met previously, and Yorm Bopha, who was in prison during an earlier research trip (see Chapter 6 for more information on incarceration). I also extended my sample to include six husbands of BKL activists and other menfolk to understand their experiences (I again adopt pseudonyms in the empirical chapters). Across both years of research, I undertook six further interviews with NGOs involved in land rights issues. In 2017 and into 2018 I also met several Cambodian political figures and journalists who were in London and who offered their views on the BKL situation.