ずーっと準備していた、男性に対する性犯罪に関する国際会議。
↓２００人以上が参加しての会議
学生たちがたくさん参加してくれて、いろいろ学んでくれた様子
わたしは、自分の調査について、１０分ほどお話しさせてもらった。
ランチ、超混み合うと思って、学生を連れて会場近くのカフェへと退避。
↓わたしのカレー、肉入れないでっていったのにたっぷり・・
↓これからベルギーに短期留学する学生はアモック
↓ロックラック、なかなかおいしそう
国際会議は一週間。いろいろイベントもあるし、楽しそう。ただ、わたしは、人身取引の調査でも走り回ってるし、週末からのラタナキリ出張の準備でてんわやんわだし、さらに仕事の依頼まで急にはいってきて、なんともてんてこまい。先週ベトナムにいたのが嘘みたい・・・・
以下は、簡単に準備した、わたしのリサーチ。
Breaking the Silence: Sharing Research into Sexual Violence During the Khmer Rouge Regime
- First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude and congratulations to the organizing committee of today’s important conference. I also would like to warmly welcome the distinguished guests from all over the world and from Cambodia, including young intelligent students from my university. I am honored to make a remark at such an important occasion to discuss about sexual violence during the conflict.
- My small speech mainly focuses on the importance of documenting the history of sexual violence in the conflict, based on my own experiences.
- Breaking silence of the terrible and painful past is extremely difficult for any survivors. But documenting the past crimes and sufferings from survivors can contribute to break silence and to end impunity. I personally found that is also empowering to the survivors as well as to me, as a researcher.
- As a pioneer in this research work, I did 2 researches on sexual violence during the Cambodian conflict, which happened 40 years ago- from 1975 to 1979, called Khmer Rouge regime.
- The first research was done in 2006 and it was the first documentation of the evidence of sexual violence during the Cambodian conflict. Although majority of survivors that I met was woman, I also met with some male survivors who were forced to have sex with their wife through forced marriages. During the conflict, marriages were all arranged by the state, and anyone who refused to marry was punished, and both men and women were victims of such marriages- my colleagues here, Mr Vou and Ms Thida will speak about this later in more details.
- In 2014, I conducted another research into the same topic, but my target was sexual minorities, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. In recent years, my personal passion has been empowering sexual minorities and therefore I worked with them closely at many different occasions. Then, I noticed that there has been no documentation about sexual violence against sexual minorities in the conflict, so I did a research.
- I believe that it is very important to hear the stories of sexual violence among most marginalized people in the Cambodian society. It can reveal a lot of hidden gender norms or rigid stereotypes and discrimination. Sexual minorities are discriminated against by the society. In the research, I met with 48 of them who experienced sexual violence in the conflict and documented their stories.
- Surprisingly, all gay men that I talked with had an experience of sexual violence during the conflict. Many of them were children when they were attacked. One gay man said that he even did not have any idea about sex when he was abused, so he was very confused afterwards about his sexualities.
- This research also found out complexities of forced marriage. I met with transgender women who were living as a woman, but forced to marry with a man. Khmer Rouge forced married couple to have a sex, so it was impossible for those women to hide their real sex to their partners. You can imagine how horrifying it was for them, and also the unimaginable shock that a husband had to endure by knowing that his wife is actually a biological man.
10. Those are only some of the stories among many, which were documented in the research. I am privileged to meet with those sexual minorities who openly shared their sufferings with me. It was empowering and inspiring to me. Many of them asked me to interview about their life story- they said that they have suffered from multiple types of discrimination and sexual violence, which no one has asked them to speak about. I will come back to them later this year to document their life story too.
- 11. My researches contribute to bring the light to the hidden parts of Cambodian history – but it is evident that more researches about sexual violence in the conflict are necessary to provide an overall picture of why and how it happened and their impacts over the lives of Cambodian people in the present time. For example, we do not have any research exclusively dealing with sexual violence against men in the conflict. We know it happens and happened from Mr Alastair’s research in Cambodia, but in regard to the conflict setting, no research has been done.
12. As we all know, sexual violence is a clear sign of the continuum of gender inequality and it serves as a maintenance machine to reinforce patriarchal system in Cambodian society. Breaking silence is difficult particularly among men in the society a rigid gender norm prevails. But we need to break silence.
13. I hope that through our discussion and participation to this one-week conference, we can come up with some good and concrete recommendations to more effectively end sexual violence against both men and women. Thank you so much for your attention.
End of the speech