[1] During the Pol Pot regime, women were exposed to several different violent acts against them such as forced marriages[2] and rape by the Khmer Rouge officials in Cambodia and refugee camps in Thailand.
[3] Presently, there is still a number of different forms of exploitation and discrimination against women in Cambodia such as rape, domestic violence, and human trafficking as the country is recovering from the history of conflict.
[10] Generally the men are the predominant income earner in the household, this is extremely common for males in rural areas.
[10] 66% of participants in the 2014 survey believed that the wives should remain silent when domestic violence occurred in order to keep the family unit together.
[10] In 2005, Cambodia introduced the legislation called Law on the Prevention of Domestic Violence and the Protection of Victims.
[11] Article 13 provided some guidelines for authorities in terms of intervention such as offering shelter to the victim, mediating, as well as educating both parties in order to reduce domestic violence from reoccurring.
One of the issue with the domestic violence law in Cambodia is that it is seen as a luxury which women who are of a poor social economic background cannot afford.
This has shown to be of some success as in the 2014 national survey showed that 95% of the participants had the source of knowledge about domestic violence law derived from mass media.
[16] Subsequently, Bauk has become a socially accepted form of recreation amongst young middle class Cambodian men.
[4] The focus of the offence is not on the lack of consent, which means that the judges tend to look at elements of violence in order to convict.
[14] A large number of rapists have escaped criminal liability due to the fact that the occurrence of compensatory payments are made to either the victims or their family in return for waiving their right to complain to the authorities.
[18] The different type of work that the NGOs have been involved with includes policy and law reforms, health services, gender sensitisation, non-formal education and rights awareness programs.