Kan Samin, 41, supports women facing domestic violence Battambang’s Boeung Pring village. Ponita Keo/HaRDstories
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In rural Cambodia, domestic violence often stays hidden behind traditional codes about family privacy. Women like Kan Samin are creating informal networks that offer abused neighbours a path between silence and formal justice.
Kan Samin has a system. When she learns of a man in her village beating his wife, she warns him. If it happens again, she warns him a second time. If it continues, she calls the police.
The village assistant in Battambang’s Boeung Pring in northwestern Cambodia had spent 20 years watching women in her community endure abuse. She’d learned that sometimes gentle intervention wasn’t enough.
“When they don’t listen and still continue the violence, I call the authorities,” the 41-year-old said.
Samin saw the patterns of domestic violence from a young age. Growing up in Boeung Pring village, she watched aunts and other women being beaten and controlled by their husbands. As an adult, two of her sisters suffered the same fate.
She didn’t believe she had the capacity to help – she lacked formal education and didn’t know how to properly write official documents. But she decided to become a village assistant anyway, a low-level government position that helps residents bring issues to village authorities.
Over two decades, she’s developed her approach: educating couples on healthy relationships, providing help to women who want to escape their abusers, and calling authorities when the violence persists.
Though national data shows intimate partner violence declining, Cambodian women in rural communities still endure abuse from their partners and family members, with justice often too expensive or damaging to pursue. Whilst many women remain in those relationships, seeing no other way out, a few are finding paths out of abuse through their communities and increased education about healthy relationships.
Where the problem remains worst
Domestic violence encompasses physical violence, financial control, emotional abuse, and sexual coercion – but the Khmer term omper herngsa knong krousar describes only physical violence within the family. According to women’s rights organisations, people in rural and lower-income communities often don’t recognise non-physical forms of abuse as domestic violence at all.
Cambodia’s most recent health statistical survey, published in 2023, shows that 21 percent of women who ever had an intimate partner experienced violence – a decrease from 29 percent recorded in 2014. The survey measured intimate partner violence specifically, which is a subset of the broader category of domestic violence that also includes abuse of children and other family members.
However, the data shows several trends suggesting that intimate partner violence occurs in lower income households, and is more common in rural communities. Intimate partner violence is increasing in Indigenous and ethnic minority households, according to a separate survey in 2023 by NGOs.
Despite the declining rate of partner violence, the human rights NGO Licadho counted 146 deaths related to domestic violence – including 46 children – since 2020. According to the organisation’s new report, fatal domestic violence cases have been rising over the past five years, and they expect other deaths have gone unreported.
“Considering violence and sexual abuse as private matters is a huge misunderstanding and misconception,” said Am Sam Ath, operations director at Licadho. “Issues of domestic violence and sexual violations are societal matters, [so] everyone, including the government and relevant authorities, must pay attention and take action to suppress, combat, and ensure that perpetrators are prosecuted according to law.”
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“Don’t bring the fires outside”
Survivors of domestic violence told HaRDstories that they struggle to report the abuses they endure, even when it affects their children or their lives outside the household. This falls in line with trends in the national health report, showing that more than half of women who experienced violence from an intimate partner did not seek help.
Nana, a farmer and mother of four in Siem Reap province whose name has been changed, said that she spent 23 years in an abusive marriage, thinking her husband would relent as he got older.
In fact, women are more likely to experience violence from their intimate partner as they get older, according to findings in the national 2021-2022 health survey.
What kept Nana in place was how her husband isolated her and her children in addition to using physical and sexual violence against her. She said that she lost all contact with friends and family, and she was only able to leave the house to drop off her kids at school.
“When he hits me so hard, he threatens me so much that I forget so much,” she told HaRDstories. She said the resulting forgetfulness was so severe that she would sometimes get lost on her way home, forgetting the path she walked daily for years.
Nana’s son – who her husband beat until he lost his sense of hearing – warned her that if she stayed, she would die. “If you don’t die, probably I will die first,” he told her.
Nana said the violence escalated to the point that her husband did try to kill her, and then kicked her and her children out of the home. That year in 2023, Nana finally escaped to the Cambodian Women’s Crisis Centre, a shelter for victims of domestic violence, and she was able to get treatment for her son’s resulting medical and mental health issues through an NGO called Lotus World.
One of the main drivers of gender-based violence in Cambodia is the societal norms and ideas of gender, taught in schools, family and social media, according to a 2023 U.N. report. Even though it was removed from official public school curricula in 2007, many Cambodians grow up learning Chbab Srey and Chbab Proh – literally “Women’s Code” and “Men’s Code” – that reinforce men’s behavior as dominant and women’s role as submissive and subservient.
The codes of conduct, written as poems, were discarded from the education system for teaching gender inequality, but 77.5 percent of women surveyed by a local NGO in 2023 said Chbab Srey was still being taught in their schools, either as literature study or a behaviour code.
The lines of the Chbab Srey poem, recited to small children like a song or fairytale, tell women to behave in measured and quiet manners, and avoid expressing negative feelings, especially to men.
One of the lines instructs women: “[When you] laugh flirtatiously without thinking, men become tempted and dare to pursue. Called as an unpleasant and worthless woman, having no manners.”
Another tells women to accept men’s behavior without communicating: “Even if your husband upsets you, my daughter goes to bed and reflects [your mistake] first.”
Chbab Srey further discourages women from reporting any problems they experience at the home, warning them not to “bring fires from inside to the outside.”
The poems also inspired a commonly cited Cambodian proverb about women and men – “men are like gold, and women are like white cloth” – assigning a value to men while women are described as easily stained.
These codes are often upheld in schools as pieces of Cambodian cultural heritage because of their ancient origins, but the Cambodia-based women’s rights organization, CEDAW, warns that their harm on society’s perception and beliefs about gender greatly outweighs the historical relevance, especially when taught to young people.
Kan Sami, a 40-year-old mother of four in Battambang province’s Boeung Pring village, said she felt she deserved it when her husband beat and scolded her earlier this year.
She took out a bank loan under her own name on behalf of her neighbour, after that person asked her for financial help. When she told her husband about the loan, she said he beat her with a stick, giving her a black eye.
Sami said she left her husband for a month after she was beaten, but then came back to him and forgave him.
“Because I was wrong and so he beat me, because I borrowed money for [someone else],” she said, explaining why she felt the violence was justified. “If I hadn’t taken out the loan, he wouldn’t beat me.”
Paths to justice
Cambodian law does offer mechanisms to report issues of domestic and sexual violence, but women’s organisations say they don’t sufficiently respond to the problem, or sometimes exacerbate the abuse.
Malis, a mother in Siem Reap province who asked to be identified by her first name, was determined to get justice after learning that an uncle raped her teenage daughter Bopha whilst Malis was in the hospital giving birth. Malis told HaRDstories that she reported the case to local police, but the relative fled the family in Siem Reap to another province.
When Malis learnt the uncle had returned, she alerted police again and they arrested him and put him in pre-trial detention as of July 2025.
Bopha said the rape destroyed her mental health: “I felt so shocked, I was thinking of committing suicide, because I didn’t have the reason to live.” The 19-year-old said she dismissed her suicidal thoughts because she knew her mother and siblings relied on her support.
Malis noticed a change in her daughter’s behaviour since the rape. She struggled to sleep and always watched films late at night. When Malis told her daughter to turn off the film, Bopha responded that she watches because she can’t stop herself from overthinking at night. They have also been ostracised from their community, who blame Bopha for her uncle’s actions, she said.
“She feels scared and doesn’t talk much, feels no excitement,” Malis said. “I always advise her to stop thinking and stop feeling discouraged.”
Cambodia also has a legal policy to settle domestic and other issues outside the courts, called alternative dispute resolution (ADR) methodology, which in 2023 became Cambodian law via a royal decree. The process focuses on resolving conflicts outside of courts through negotiation and conciliation with village or commune leaders. But critics argue that in the context of domestic violence, it often encourages survivors to stay with their abusers.
Chhek Srey, a mother of three in Siem Reap province who asked to be identified by her first name, said that she tried to use ADR in her village to request a divorce from her husband, but it exacerbated the issue.
Her marriage declined after she had her first child in 1998. Shortly after giving birth, she fell ill and was unable to get adequate care. The illness caused her to lose her balance and ability to walk, and she had to use a wheelchair. That’s when her husband started to leave the house in search of other women.
“There are no happy times, only times of tears,” Srey said. “I can’t eat anything. No matter how delicious the food is, I can’t eat it. But for our children, I eat with tears so that my stomach can have some rice.”
He would throw things and shout at her occasionally, but this increased after she went with him to the commune chief in 2023, asking to use the ADR process and file for a divorce.
“He strangled my neck; my kid helped and pushed him away,” she recalled. “When he gets angry, he threatens me, he’s trying to kill me.”
Chhek Srey said her husband eventually left the house again to try to get a new girlfriend, and she finally escaped 30 years of abuse by seeking help from an NGO, Banteay Srei.
A 2020 survey of women who tried the ADR process for domestic abuse found that 80 percent of them had negative experiences seeking justice in their communities. According to the survey by the local NGO Women Peace Makers, women found they could not get their cases referred to the appropriate authority, couldn’t get divorced, or struggled with power dynamics within their villages.
The long way out
The women who found their way out of domestic violence told HaRDStories that they could not have done it on their own.
The reasons that women become trapped in domestic violence are complicated, explains Chheun Saran, a counsellor for the women’s shelter Banteay Srei in Siem Reap province. Victims of domestic violence, sexual abuse and financial control are often struggling with other issues, like isolation and poverty, and therefore feel they will have harder lives if they leave an abusive relationship.
Saran knows this from experience. When she began volunteering at Banteay Srei in 2012, she was in an emotionally abusive marriage but didn’t recognise it as such. Learning about domestic violence through her work changed that. Equipped with her own salary and new understanding, she confronted her husband.
She gave her husband a choice: stop the abuse or lose his family. “He told me he decided to stop all kinds of actions [to control me],” she said. “And from that day, he has.”
Now a full-time counsellor, Saran said that law enforcement alone cannot combat domestic violence, and instead any real changes will come from educating society on the harms of abuse.
“If the police catch [a perpetrator], will they let him out again?” Saran asked. “If he returns, [victims] will all die the same way.”
Back in Boeung Pring village, Kan Samin has taken the same approach – talking about domestic violence openly rather than treating it as a private family matter.
After learning about women’s issues, Samin realised she could help others by sharing that knowledge. “As a woman I can help other women,” she said. “It will empower them to have more courage.”
Domestic violence still occurs in her village, but since she started spreading awareness and advising families, most have listened and respected her, she said. The situation feels more manageable now.
For the women in her community, Samin dreams of vocational training and programmes that would give them economic independence and real pathways forward.
But even before that, communities need someone like her, someone to check in, to intervene, to provide a way out.
“It is important for communities to have this,” she said. “It can help reduce a lot of issues, and I know it from my own experiences.”
Kong Sreyrath is a Cambodian freelance journalist and fixer whose work has been published in local and international outlets. Her work focuses on gender equality, disability, and social inclusion (GEDSI), child protection, indigenous rights, environmental sustainability, and peace and conflict resolution.
Ponita Keo is a Cambodian documentarian working across photography and film. Having previously worked in global news media as an assignment editor, she now maintains an independent documentary practice. As a photojournalist, she focuses on human-interest stories related to gender and social justice.
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