Cambodian women’s rights activist Sochua Mu, left, with Michele Tayler of Redding, whose trip to Cambodia led to the formation of the charity WAVE, Women Against Violence Everywhere. WAVE's initial fund-raiser, with Ms. Mu speaking May 4 at the Keeler Tavern Garden House in Ridgefield, raised enough money to build nine safe houses for women in rural Cambodian villages. (Photo: The Ridgefield Press)May 12, 2006
By Macklin Reid
The Ridgefield Press (Connecticut, USA)
“Rape, trafficking, domestic violence, mutilation, infanticide,” said Cambodian women’s rights activist Sochua Mu, listing the forms that gender-based violence takes in her troubled homeland.
Ms. Mu, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, spoke to a crowd of about 75 in the Keeler Tavern Garden House. It was the kick-off fund raiser for the locally-organized charity WAVE, Women Against Violence Everywhere. The event raised some $18,000 — enough to build nine sanctuaries or safe houses for women in rural Cambodian villages.
“It was great, fabulous,” said Ridgefielder Sue Fogerty, owner of The Silver Lining on Main Street, whose extended family came together to form WAVE and organize the May 4 fund-raiser.
“They put it all together in four or five or six weeks,” she said.
“If you bring it to people’s attention, they really do care and they want to participate,” said Michele Tayler of Redding, whose trip to Cambodia with her husband, former Ridgefielder Brayton Fogerty, started it all.
Amy Wilmot, a Ridgefielder and real estate agent who came to hear Ms. Mu speak, said later that although it was only a part of the presentation she was most troubled by the plight of the young Cambodian girls who get lured away from villages with promises of work and end up as prostitutes.
“The girls, they’re 12 and 13, and their searching for money, and they get stuck in the sex trade,” she said.
Ridgefield Library director Chris Nolan heard the message.
“Oh, my God, I was moved,” she said. “I think women across the world will try very hard to help other women in whatever way they can.”
Although it is a beautiful and in many ways tranquil place, Ms. Mu said, her homeland is still struggling to overcome the trauma of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas under Pol Pot, whose reign of terror went beyond ruthlessness and descended into a pathological bloodbath. Pol Pot led a rural-based communist insurgency which became an anti-western, anti-urban revolution that ran out of control. Victorious armed guerrillas — many of them young teenagers — brutally purged the nation’s westernized and educated citizens. Some were sent for harsh “re-education” and work in the fields. Others were simply killed.
“Pol Pot killed 2 million people,” Ms. Mu said. “...That’s the legacy we are still living with.”
The violence reached into her own life.
“My parents were killed,” she said. “I was a student in America. I became a refugee. I lost my parents.”
The violence of that era is something that many Cambodians carry in their hearts — traumatic memories and emotional scars that cannot simply be forgotten, even by a largely Buddhist nation known for its gentle ways.
“The gentle people,” Ms. Mu said. “But inside us, so much pain. And when that pain bursts out it becomes violence, and the victims are children, the victims are women.”
The first project being undertaken by WAVE is to help Ms. Mu and an organization called Sanctuary from Violence build safe houses for women and girls in 18 Cambodian villages in Kompong Cham Province.
“What is so important about the gathering is there is a very very urgent call for help, and you heard the call,” Ms. Mu told the crowd at the Keeler Tavern Garden House.
Cambodia is a traditional society with many people who hold backwards beliefs about women and their role. The violence against women comes in the context of a culture which de-values them. A woman who is raped, sold into prostitution, or in some cases who simply becomes a widow, may be regarded as an outcast, a disgrace to her family — even if her plight came about through no fault of her own.
“Domestic violence is a crime, but women are silent because of fear, shame, no education, and a corrupt court system,” Ms. Mu said.
Ms. Mu has served as Cambodia’s Minister for Women’s Affairs and is a former member of the Cambodian Parliament. She said that when she was in the government she tried to get enacted a domestic violence law that included a prohibition against “marital rape” — it got nowhere in the male-dominated legislature.
She characterized for the largely female audience at the Keeler Tavern Garden House the attitudes of Cambodian men toward this concept.
“What do you mean ‘marital rape?’ I own her. I bought her. If I want to have sex with her, she’s my wife. I own her,” Ms. Mu said.
She had tried to change too much, too quickly, Ms. Mu admitted. Her successor as minister of women’s affairs succeeded in getting a law passed, making domestic violence a crime — but with the marital rape provision dropped.
Ms. Mu said she now recognizes this as a pragmatic compromise needed to get the law passed.
The building of village safe-houses or sanctuaries for women is a way to provide for the victimized women within the community, so they aren’t turned out and forgotten.
“The whole idea is to have the women network at the village level,” she said. “...It has to be a village issue.”
So far, 11 have been built in a different province, thanks to the support of women’s organizations in Holland and Germany.
Having safe-houses in the village is only the beginning.
“It’s not just about women having a house, but also for men to say ‘No more violence against women,’ ” Ms. Mu said.
She outlined some of the hardships women and children in Cambodia face.
The mortality rate is very high, comparatively, for women in childbirth and for children in their first years of life.
“Many children die before they reach the age of five years old,” she said.
Education is supposed to be free — it’s guaranteed in the Cambodia constitution — but that isn’t the reality.
“Half of the children, especially girls, will drop of school by the third grade,” Ms. Mu said.
When a family has difficulty affording school, or handling all the work at home, daughters — before sons — are pulled out of school.
“The boy will go to school,” Ms. Mu said, “but the girl will stay at home.”
Ms. Mu said she would be running for Parliament again in 2008 — as a member of the opposition party.
The percentage of women winning seats in the Cambodian parliament rose from 12% in 1998 to 20% in 2003, she said, and the goal was make it even higher.
“In 2008 we want 30%,” she said with a laugh, “and I will beat you in America!”
Meanwhile, she will continue to work to build safe houses in Cambodia’s Chamkar Andong commune, which is made up of 18 rural villages in an area where the employment was once dominated by rubber plantations that are now in decline or closed. The population of the 18 villages is about 17,000, and about 9,000 to 10,000 are female.
“I thank you all, and I believe we can make the 18 houses,” she said.
Even if this is accomplished, there will be more work to do. “There are 130,000 villages in Cambodia,” Ms. Mu said with a smile.
Michele Tayler of WAVE explained how the group the fund-raising supports, Strey Khmer — it means “Cambodian women,” she said — works to create the women’s safe houses within the fabric of the local village society.
“One woman gives over her house to be the sanctuary,” she said. “They build an addition to her house. They build a fence and a gate. And then they develop a network of local women to staff the house and act as psycho-social counselors. So, Strey Khmer does three or four trainings for these women over the course of a year.
“Together they develop that bond that’s vital, that support system that lets women know that they have a place to go, where they don’t have to live in shame and silence.”
The work of the American women — fund raising, and publicizing — will go on, too.
“If anybody feels like donating, we have two things set up,” Ms. Tayler said. “You can donate through Give2Asia, which is an organization that provides complete transparency for all donations. It’s a donor approved fund for the Sanctuary from Violence project.”
The other way to donate is to make a check payable to WAVE, and send it to WAVE at PO Box 785, Georgetown, CT, 06829.
There is also a website:
thewaveproject.org
“The reason it’s important that this work happens in the villages is, then, hopefully, it stops that exodus of girls being taken, girls being abducted, girls being lured by false promises of jobs and traineeships,” Ms. Tayler said. “People are desperate. If you’re living on 50 cents or $1 a day, trying to feed your family, chances are one of your children may get offered up in some way.”
As a Westerner who wants to help, Ms. Tayler said, she doesn’t expect to devote her life to charity work — but she’s had her eyes opened and she’s going to do something.
“You’ve just got to do as much as you can do, reasonably, with a bunch of criteria in place, so you can evaluate, and hope you can make a difference.”
Organizers of WAVE and its first fund-raiser include Mr. Tayler, Elizabeth Stewart of Redding, Jen Thomas of Danbury, Diane Fogerty of Wilton, and Margaret Fogerty Rattigan of West Hartford.
Sue Fogerty said the Ridgefield business community of which she is a part had generously supported the fund-raiser that her children and their spouses and friends had organized.
“Everyone in Ridgefield cooperated, the banks and stores,” she said.
Ms. Mu told the crowd at the Keeler Tavern Garden House that her work will go on.
“Every time I hear of a rape of a girl who was trafficked, of a woman who is beaten, I feel the pain,” Ms. Mu said.
These women who bravely and routinely go on with their lives, despite their circumstances and victimization, are her inspiration, she said.
“My strength comes from their strength, just watching them,” she said. “They fight for survival. They cry for justice.”
Ms. Mu, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, spoke to a crowd of about 75 in the Keeler Tavern Garden House. It was the kick-off fund raiser for the locally-organized charity WAVE, Women Against Violence Everywhere. The event raised some $18,000 — enough to build nine sanctuaries or safe houses for women in rural Cambodian villages.
“It was great, fabulous,” said Ridgefielder Sue Fogerty, owner of The Silver Lining on Main Street, whose extended family came together to form WAVE and organize the May 4 fund-raiser.
“They put it all together in four or five or six weeks,” she said.
“If you bring it to people’s attention, they really do care and they want to participate,” said Michele Tayler of Redding, whose trip to Cambodia with her husband, former Ridgefielder Brayton Fogerty, started it all.
Amy Wilmot, a Ridgefielder and real estate agent who came to hear Ms. Mu speak, said later that although it was only a part of the presentation she was most troubled by the plight of the young Cambodian girls who get lured away from villages with promises of work and end up as prostitutes.
“The girls, they’re 12 and 13, and their searching for money, and they get stuck in the sex trade,” she said.
Ridgefield Library director Chris Nolan heard the message.
“Oh, my God, I was moved,” she said. “I think women across the world will try very hard to help other women in whatever way they can.”
Although it is a beautiful and in many ways tranquil place, Ms. Mu said, her homeland is still struggling to overcome the trauma of the Khmer Rouge guerrillas under Pol Pot, whose reign of terror went beyond ruthlessness and descended into a pathological bloodbath. Pol Pot led a rural-based communist insurgency which became an anti-western, anti-urban revolution that ran out of control. Victorious armed guerrillas — many of them young teenagers — brutally purged the nation’s westernized and educated citizens. Some were sent for harsh “re-education” and work in the fields. Others were simply killed.
“Pol Pot killed 2 million people,” Ms. Mu said. “...That’s the legacy we are still living with.”
The violence reached into her own life.
“My parents were killed,” she said. “I was a student in America. I became a refugee. I lost my parents.”
The violence of that era is something that many Cambodians carry in their hearts — traumatic memories and emotional scars that cannot simply be forgotten, even by a largely Buddhist nation known for its gentle ways.
“The gentle people,” Ms. Mu said. “But inside us, so much pain. And when that pain bursts out it becomes violence, and the victims are children, the victims are women.”
The first project being undertaken by WAVE is to help Ms. Mu and an organization called Sanctuary from Violence build safe houses for women and girls in 18 Cambodian villages in Kompong Cham Province.
“What is so important about the gathering is there is a very very urgent call for help, and you heard the call,” Ms. Mu told the crowd at the Keeler Tavern Garden House.
Cambodia is a traditional society with many people who hold backwards beliefs about women and their role. The violence against women comes in the context of a culture which de-values them. A woman who is raped, sold into prostitution, or in some cases who simply becomes a widow, may be regarded as an outcast, a disgrace to her family — even if her plight came about through no fault of her own.
“Domestic violence is a crime, but women are silent because of fear, shame, no education, and a corrupt court system,” Ms. Mu said.
Ms. Mu has served as Cambodia’s Minister for Women’s Affairs and is a former member of the Cambodian Parliament. She said that when she was in the government she tried to get enacted a domestic violence law that included a prohibition against “marital rape” — it got nowhere in the male-dominated legislature.
She characterized for the largely female audience at the Keeler Tavern Garden House the attitudes of Cambodian men toward this concept.
“What do you mean ‘marital rape?’ I own her. I bought her. If I want to have sex with her, she’s my wife. I own her,” Ms. Mu said.
She had tried to change too much, too quickly, Ms. Mu admitted. Her successor as minister of women’s affairs succeeded in getting a law passed, making domestic violence a crime — but with the marital rape provision dropped.
Ms. Mu said she now recognizes this as a pragmatic compromise needed to get the law passed.
The building of village safe-houses or sanctuaries for women is a way to provide for the victimized women within the community, so they aren’t turned out and forgotten.
“The whole idea is to have the women network at the village level,” she said. “...It has to be a village issue.”
So far, 11 have been built in a different province, thanks to the support of women’s organizations in Holland and Germany.
Having safe-houses in the village is only the beginning.
“It’s not just about women having a house, but also for men to say ‘No more violence against women,’ ” Ms. Mu said.
She outlined some of the hardships women and children in Cambodia face.
The mortality rate is very high, comparatively, for women in childbirth and for children in their first years of life.
“Many children die before they reach the age of five years old,” she said.
Education is supposed to be free — it’s guaranteed in the Cambodia constitution — but that isn’t the reality.
“Half of the children, especially girls, will drop of school by the third grade,” Ms. Mu said.
When a family has difficulty affording school, or handling all the work at home, daughters — before sons — are pulled out of school.
“The boy will go to school,” Ms. Mu said, “but the girl will stay at home.”
Ms. Mu said she would be running for Parliament again in 2008 — as a member of the opposition party.
The percentage of women winning seats in the Cambodian parliament rose from 12% in 1998 to 20% in 2003, she said, and the goal was make it even higher.
“In 2008 we want 30%,” she said with a laugh, “and I will beat you in America!”
Meanwhile, she will continue to work to build safe houses in Cambodia’s Chamkar Andong commune, which is made up of 18 rural villages in an area where the employment was once dominated by rubber plantations that are now in decline or closed. The population of the 18 villages is about 17,000, and about 9,000 to 10,000 are female.
“I thank you all, and I believe we can make the 18 houses,” she said.
Even if this is accomplished, there will be more work to do. “There are 130,000 villages in Cambodia,” Ms. Mu said with a smile.
Michele Tayler of WAVE explained how the group the fund-raising supports, Strey Khmer — it means “Cambodian women,” she said — works to create the women’s safe houses within the fabric of the local village society.
“One woman gives over her house to be the sanctuary,” she said. “They build an addition to her house. They build a fence and a gate. And then they develop a network of local women to staff the house and act as psycho-social counselors. So, Strey Khmer does three or four trainings for these women over the course of a year.
“Together they develop that bond that’s vital, that support system that lets women know that they have a place to go, where they don’t have to live in shame and silence.”
The work of the American women — fund raising, and publicizing — will go on, too.
“If anybody feels like donating, we have two things set up,” Ms. Tayler said. “You can donate through Give2Asia, which is an organization that provides complete transparency for all donations. It’s a donor approved fund for the Sanctuary from Violence project.”
The other way to donate is to make a check payable to WAVE, and send it to WAVE at PO Box 785, Georgetown, CT, 06829.
There is also a website:
thewaveproject.org
“The reason it’s important that this work happens in the villages is, then, hopefully, it stops that exodus of girls being taken, girls being abducted, girls being lured by false promises of jobs and traineeships,” Ms. Tayler said. “People are desperate. If you’re living on 50 cents or $1 a day, trying to feed your family, chances are one of your children may get offered up in some way.”
As a Westerner who wants to help, Ms. Tayler said, she doesn’t expect to devote her life to charity work — but she’s had her eyes opened and she’s going to do something.
“You’ve just got to do as much as you can do, reasonably, with a bunch of criteria in place, so you can evaluate, and hope you can make a difference.”
Organizers of WAVE and its first fund-raiser include Mr. Tayler, Elizabeth Stewart of Redding, Jen Thomas of Danbury, Diane Fogerty of Wilton, and Margaret Fogerty Rattigan of West Hartford.
Sue Fogerty said the Ridgefield business community of which she is a part had generously supported the fund-raiser that her children and their spouses and friends had organized.
“Everyone in Ridgefield cooperated, the banks and stores,” she said.
Ms. Mu told the crowd at the Keeler Tavern Garden House that her work will go on.
“Every time I hear of a rape of a girl who was trafficked, of a woman who is beaten, I feel the pain,” Ms. Mu said.
These women who bravely and routinely go on with their lives, despite their circumstances and victimization, are her inspiration, she said.
“My strength comes from their strength, just watching them,” she said. “They fight for survival. They cry for justice.”
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