Short Story
Cambodian lifts
Last month, Sopha introduced her neighbor to her sister, Dr Chenda. It was an emergency. Her neighbor, Sinourn, was feeling very sick. Sopha told Dr Chenda that Sinourn was in pain, because she had been badly beaten by her husband. "When he gets home from work, he argues with her," Sopha explained. "He asks her for money to buy rice wine and if she refuses, he hits her. If he'd beaten her any more, I don't know what would have happened, but, fortunately, he was arrested just in time and put in the local jail."
For Dr Chenda this was a sad but familiar story. She knew lots of husbands and fathers who, although they sometimes helped with the housework and looked after the children, still claimed that a mother's place was in the home and that a wife's duty was to obey her husband. It was because of such ideas that women like Sinourn were kept like prisoners in their own homes. In fact Sinourn had only managed to escape from her 'prison' when her husband had been taken away by the police.
If Dr Chenda hadn't known about and become interested in human rights and, more particularly, women's rights, perhaps she too would have shared these traditional ideas. Instead, however, she supported human rights and had become actively involved in the rights of people who had a weak position in society : the poor, children, minority groups and, of course, women. Especially those who, like Sinourn, were victims of violence. And, as a doctor, she sometimes found herself in a good position to help some of them.
After about a week, the police invited Sinourn to go to the police station to make a formal complaint against her husband. Sinourn, however, who was still feeling dizzy and weak, didn't know whether she wanted to or not. As well as herself, she had her children to think of. If her husband was kept in jail, what would happen to them ? They needed the money that he earned, even if he did quarrel and spend too much money on rice wine.