Home SOS. Katherine Brickell

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