In Cambodia, like the rest of the world, men and women play out their lives within the constraints of established gender norms and society is patriarchal. Family breadwinners are predominantly male and literacy rates are more than 10% lower among women than men. Levels of sexual violence are high: according to a 2013 UN report on violence against women in the Asia-Pacific region, one in five of Cambodian men admit to committing rape, and of these, more than 44 percent have never faced legal consequences.
But across the country women are rising up, and not solely in response to gender discrimination, but as part of a protest movement to protect their land from redevelopment and communities from forced evictions.
Since the Cambodian government standardised economic land concessions in 2001, whereby land is leased to companies usually for 70 years, international companies have forced ordinary people in both urban and rural areas to vacate their land in order to make way for development.
