Rape is on the rise, and Cambodia’s social and judicial institutions are woefully ill-equipped to deal with sexual violence, according to an Amnesty International report released yesterday to mark International Women’s Day.
Drawing on interviews with 30 victims and some 50 lawyers, government officials and NGO workers, the report focuses on the aftermath of rape in Cambodia, which can be almost as traumatic as the original attack.
Victims must battle with inadequate medical and forensic facilities, an indifferent criminal justice system and entrenched discrimination against women who have supposedly been “spoiled” through no fault of their own for being victims of rape.
Meas Veasna, the only victim who requested that her full name be used in the report, said she was raped at a Prey Veng pagoda in June 2009. She had just given birth and went there to get holy water but a monk offered her instead a cup of coffee laced with drugs. Once Ms Veasna passed out, the monk raped her inside a monastery building.
At a meeting with police officials, pagoda leaders offered her $250 in compensation but nothing has come of Ms Veasna’s insistence that the perpetrator be brought to justice. The police investigation appears to have stalled.
“I feel both anxiety and pain,” she told the report’s authors. “It is hard to explain, but reporting [the crime] all over the place [and] no one has taken any action…just eternal silence.”
“My reputation is just crashing,” she added. “I am feeling a lot of shame and initially wanted to commit suicide.”
Ms Veasna is an exception: Rape victims in Cambodia are often reluctant to discuss or report their rapes due to a crippling combination of stigma, fear and poverty. Almost all of the women interviewed by Amnesty were poorer than their rapists, according to researcher Brittis Edman, and many were scared to report the crime because their attackers had “khnang,” a Khmer term for one’s ties to local officials or businessmen.
“At its worst,” the Amnesty report charges, “the system in place to help survivors of sexual violence in Cambodia is a set of moneymaking schemes to provide personal benefit for the public officials involved rather than bring justice to the victims.”
Most of the rape victims interviewed for the report said they were asked to pay a bribe to set a criminal investigation in motion. Many were also pressured by police to accept extra-judicial monetary settlements, also known as samroh-samruol, with part of the fee going to the officer who negotiates the payment on behalf of the rapist.
“Police only work if you have money, if you can pay,” said the father of a mentally disabled teenager who has been raped twice. “One hundred thousand riels and you get someone arrested, but we didn’t have that.”
National Police spokesman Kirth Chantharith said that bribery and samroh-samruol were neither condoned nor widespread among Cambodian law enforcement officers.
“Of course I have heard the complaints from NGOs saying like what you asked, but…we never allow our officers to deal with the rape cases to allow the victim or the offender to compromise and then release the offender without sending them to court,” Mr Chantharith claimed.
“Our Commissioner-General always tells police not to do like that,” he added.
In late December, the National Police said that there were 247 rapes reported in Cambodia last year, while local rights group Adhoc put the number at over 450.
Speaking yesterday at a press conference marking the report’s release, Pung Chhiv Kek, the chairwoman of the Cambodian NGO committee on the UN Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, compared the difficulty in Cambodia of bringing a rape case to trial to “pushing an elephant.”
“We have to fight the tendency to say, ‘I don’t want to go to court because it’s useless’ and just accept the money. It’s very difficult,” she said.
At yesterday’s press conference, Ms Kek and Donna Guest, Amnesty’s deputy Asia program director, highlighted another key problem: It is hard to get a grip on the scope of sexual violence in Cambodia, because no government body accurately records the number of reported rapes.
“From 1992 until now, every year we’ve received more cases of rape of women and children,” Ms Kek said. “The problem is that we don’t have national statistics from the government, so it’s very difficult for us to say for sure.”
“We are calling on the government to establish comprehensive statistics and monitoring so that this problem can be fully addressed,” Ms Guest added.
Mr Chantharith, the police spokesman, challenged the call for better rape recording, claiming that National Police statistics are trustworthy.
“We follow up from day to day—we have received the report every day from the entire country from the local police,” he said.
He attributed the 19.9 percent rise in rape from 2008 to 2009 to liquor and pornography.
“We can see that most of them are related to alcohol, pornography, drugs,” he said, adding that the National Police are still working on an in-depth study of their own into the root causes of the problem.
Amnesty’s conclusion was a bit different.
Impunity and a culture of discrimination against women are perhaps the most important factors behind the creeping scourge of rape, Ms Edman said.
The report, entitled “Breaking the Silence,” called on the government to increase support services for rape victims, train police and doctors to deal with sexual violence, and ensure that police and courtroom procedures are safe and victim-friendly.
But it also asks the government to work at a more fundamental level on eliminating social mores that lead to discrimination and violence.
A well-known Cambodian proverb holds that “men are gold, women are cloth”: Not only are men more valuable than women, but women can be permanently stained by sexual indiscretion or violence. This is borne out in the statements by the report’s interviewees, who speak of their intense shame and embarrassment at having been raped.
Chantha was 14 when she was violently raped by her stepfather in 2007. He was arrested but quickly released after bribing police, and is still walking free.
“I am afraid he will kill my family, and also when I am in the village I feel a lot of shame,” she told Amnesty. “I’m afraid that I won’t be able to find someone to love me.”
