Home SOS. Katherine Brickell

Ever‐married refers to persons who have been married at least once in their lives although their current marital status may not be married.

      2 2 Linguistically, at least in Khmer, there is no word for home. While phteah literally means house, the Khmer word Kruosar is equivalent to family.

      3 3 These high‐level observations relate to broader academic ones that the effects of displacement are not gender neutral, impacting men and women differently. This has been evidenced in relation to: conflict (Brun, 2000; Ensor 2017; Majidi and Hennion 2014; Manchanda 2004; Meertens and Segura‐Escobar 1996; Suerbaum 2018); development (Brickell 2014a; Fernández Arrigoitia 2017; Mehta, 2009; Muñoz 2017, Perry 2013); gentrification (Lyons et al 2017; Mirabal 2009; Maharawal and McElroy, 2018; Sakizhoglu, 2018; Watt, 2018; Wright 2013); the extractive industries (Ahmad and Kuntala Lahiri‐Dutt, 2006); and/or natural disasters (de Mel 2017; Gorman‐Murray, McKinnon, and Dominey‐Howes 2014; Juran, 2012; Tanyag, 2018).

      4 4 More detailed information on each vicinity can be found in my PhD thesis (Brickell 2007).

      5 5 At this point in time, Orm had one prior formal divorce and two subsequent failed non‐marital relationships.

      6 6 The original research design had intended to include an equal proportion of men in the sample. However, no village leaders were able (or perhaps willing) to identify men who had experienced marital breakdown. National level statistics available at the time corroborated this situation with more women officially ‘divorced’ than men in both the 2008 General Population Census (0.8% males/3.1% females) (National Institute of Statistics 2009) and the 2005 Cambodian Demography Health Survey (CDHS) (1.8% males/4.2% females) (National Institute of Public Health et al. 2006). More recently, the National Institute of Statistics et al. (2014) record that, on average, across the 15–49 age cohort, only 1.4% of men are divorced in comparison to 3.4% of women.

      7 7 This information is not available in newer versions of the CDHS.

      8 8 See, however, the study by Sothy Eng, Szmodis, and Grace (2017) on the prevalence of domestic violence among remarried women in Cambodia.

      9 9 The translation of this poster, is as follows. (Left): The abilities and duties of the authorities: (in the case of) the use of violence against wives or family members, the closest authorities have a duty to intervene immediately in cases where violence against the family takes place. (Right): Duties of the authorities when intervening in family violence: the authorities must identify a clear reason for the occurrence and then report it urgently to the prosecuting authorities (the court).

      10 10 The Asian Development Bank and AusAid have attracted criticism for inadequate safeguarding against breaches of human rights as part of their funding of the ‘Cambodia Railway Rehabilitation Project’. The range of options and full entitlements under the resettlement plan were not made available to project‐affected households (Inclusive Development International 2012). The project was launched in 2006 to restore the country’s dysfunctional railway infrastructure as part of the ADB’s Greater Mekong Sub‐Region Programme. See http://www.babcambodia.org/railways for a video on the harm experienced.

      11 11 I refer to ‘Khmer’ women specifically as I did not conduct research within any ethnic minority communities who represent less than 5% of the population.

Chapter Two Conceptualising Domestic Crises

      Introduction

      In Chapter 1, I introduced the overarching ways that the book synthesises its analysis of domestic violence and forced eviction, as crisis ordinaries, as sources and forms of survival‐work, and as types of gender‐based violence, which have been unduly overlooked in academic writing. Over the next five sections, the crisis ordinary and survival‐work, bio‐necropolitics and precarity, intimate war and slow violence, law and lawfare, and rights to dwell, I continue to set up the conceptual parameters through which domestic violence and forced eviction can be best understood. Their exchange and prognosis‐seeking contribute to efforts in geography to trace and explain the intimate violences of world (un)making and their multi‐origin and multi‐scalar manifestations.

Crisis Ordinary and Survival‐Work

While Rebecca Solnett (2009, p. 10) writes that ‘emergency is a separation from the familiar, a sudden emergence into a new atmosphere, one that often demands we rise ourselves to the occasion’, the crisis ordinarily frames domestic violence and forced evictions as long emergencies of slow violence that are unrelenting in their normative unfolding. They are domains ‘where an upsetting of living is revealed to be interwoven with everyday life after all’ (Berlant 2007, p. 761). Eminent in Cambodia, Naly Pilorge, Director of the Cambodian NGO LICADHO, discerned more than a decade ago that ‘everyone claims Cambodia has come through a period of barbarism, but the sadism is still bubbling beneath the surface. Extreme violence, greed, and disregard for the most basic rights – of giving people a place to live – are still with us daily’ (cited in Levy and Scott‐Clark 2008, np). Home SOS thereby explores the paths of Cambodian homes and lives (still) submerged in protracted circumstances of violence. These are paths that in various ways have global reach and wider relevance beyond Cambodia.

      Domestic violence has been described as ‘one of the starkest collective failures of the international community’ (Action Aid 2010, p. 1). It is likely that there has been an under‐estimate, given the non‐reporting of cases, of worldwide data, which indicates that 35% of women have experienced either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non‐partner sexual violence (World Health Organization 2014a). In the last 40 years, violence against women has become visible as a major social issue and has been labelled ‘a global health problem of epidemic proportions’ (WHO 2014a). Domestic violence has also been described in the media and international health arena as a ‘hidden crisis’ worldwide (BBC 2018; WHO 2014b), thus rhetorically challenging its non‐eventful status in popular and political consciousness. The ‘hidden crisis’ of violence against women has additionally been raised within the context of other, more archetypal crisis scenarios, including academic work on the current refugee ‘crisis’ in Europe (Freedman 2016) and in the wake of natural disasters (Nguyen 2019; Parkinson and Zara 2013).

In a similar discursive vein to domestic violence as a global problem, forced eviction – when people are forced out of their homes against their will often with the threat of use of violence (Amnesty International 2012, p. 2) – has been described as a ‘global phenomenon’ and a ‘global crisis’ (UN‐HABITAT 2011b, p. viii). Forced eviction is ‘the permanent or temporary removal against their will of individuals, families and/or communities from the homes and/or land which they occupy, without the provision of, and access to, appropriate forms of legal or other protection’ (Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1997, np). Every year, millions of people around the world are forcibly evicted from their homes and their land (United Nations 2014). Yet, despite this, for too long ‘social scientists, journalists, and policymakers all but ignored eviction, making it one of the least studied processes affecting the lives of poor families’ (Desmond 2016, pp. 265–296). Looking to rectify this trend, Matthew Desmond’s (2016) book Evicted shows that in Milwaukee, the United States, eviction