Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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a mainstay argument pursued in Home SOS is that women are not only disproportionally impacted upon by domestic violence and forced eviction as events and processes in themselves but that they are also tasked with the adjustive work of homemaking and the management of everyday precarity stemming from this. The expectation of, and necessity for, women’s survival-work in the crisis ordinary is highly problematic and the home is a key setting where this can be identified and studied. Homemaking is a cultural process and since a ‘culture only exists as a sum total of its iterations’ (Macgregor Wise 2000, p. 310), this ‘pragmatic (life‐making)’ and ‘accretive (life‐building)’ work becomes endangered and more arduous when the conditions for predictability are undermined (Berlant 2007, p. 757). My reference to survival is therefore a ‘back to basics’ move (Heynen 2006, p. 920), which recognises the centrality of home to survival and the labours that go into the meeting of basic material need, familiarity, and comfort. ‘Practices of survivability’, Loretta Lees, Annunziata, and Rivas‐Alonso (2018, p. 349) write, include ‘all of the different practices people employ to stay put’ and that counteract ‘blanket statements of neoliberal hegemony’.
The survival-work that women do to ‘stay put’ is underpinned by the home being both ‘a nodal point of concrete social relations’ and ‘a conceptual or discursive space of identification’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998, p. 17). The home as a physical and ideological entity reflects the significance of place in ‘displacement’ (Davidson 2009, p. 226, emphasis in original). As I conjectured earlier, domestic violence and forced eviction are attempted deprivations of home, its material infrastructure, and/or sense of belonging. Domestic violence is one of the most overlooked forms of displacement as women are often forced to leave their homes suddenly, without their possessions, to an unknown and unfamiliar place (Warrington 2001; Graham and Brickell 2019). In the United Kingdom, for example, tens of thousands of forced migrations occur each year as a result of domestic violence yet it is a country designated as having no internally displaced persons (Bowstead 2015, 2017). Such mobilities
‘could certainly be understood as emergency’ given that they ‘demand highly intensive forms of movement that radically transform one’s life chances and quality of life’ (Adey 2016, p. 32). Women experience ‘a process of spatial churn’ as they undertake individual, isolated journeys, and move multiple times before they are able to find a settled home (Bowstead 2015, p. 317). For women who cannot leave meanwhile, they may feel ‘homeless at home’ (Wardhaugh 1999), living in, and managing, a violent environment through daily and multiple forms of survival-work. The ideological scripting of home as intimate and safe can also lead to women tolerating violence so as not to signal a deep failure or collapse of home (Price 2002). The book shows that in Cambodia, this ideological scripting is strongly focused on women’s familial responsibilities and has a similar influence. Part of what makes the violence so untenable and cruel is the survival-work required to keep up this pretence.
The threat of forced eviction can also lead to the chipping away of home, materially and metaphorically, and the eventual displacement and dislocation of families ejected from their homes leads to their ‘re‐settlement’/homelessness. Much like the ‘spatial churn’ that domestic violence survivors can face, forced eviction also produces a harmful turbulence that women must typically counteract through their emotional and physical labours. Survival-work inside, and outside of, the home is therefore an important, yet still neglected, part of labour and economic geography that warrants scholarly development (Strauss 2018).
The Gender‐Based Violences of Domestic Violence and Forced Eviction
While domestic violence and forced eviction are significant issues for women in their own right, Home SOS contends that, taken together, they most clearly and definitively demonstrate the gendered contingency of existence in contemporary Cambodia. Situating the book as a feminist geography intervention with broader (inter)disciplinary significance, I venture that both are acts of gender‐based violence. Gender‐based violence is defined as ‘violence which is directed against a woman because she is a woman or that affects women disproportionately’ (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) 1992, np). This includes acts that inflict physical, mental, or sexual harm or suffering, the threat of such acts, coercion, and other deprivations of liberty (CEDAW 1992).
Domestic violence is a well‐known form of gender‐based violence that encompasses violence against women by an intimate partner and/or other family members, wherever this takes place, and in whatever form, be this physical, sexual, psychological, or economic. Adult women account for the vast majority of domestic violence victims globally. The insidious nature of domestic violence in Cambodia was first highlighted by inaugural research conducted in the mid‐1990s by the Project Against Domestic Violence with 1374 women (Nelson and Zimmerman 1996). The study found that 16% of women surveyed reported physical abuse by their spouses and 8% acquired injuries mostly to the head. More recently, a nationally representative Partners for Prevention (P4P) (2013) study showed that one in four women (25.3%) in Cambodia had experienced in their lifetime at least one act of physical or sexual violence, or both, perpetrated by an intimate partner. Figures published in the country’s National Survey on Women’s Health and Life Experiences (MOWA 2015) report too that approximately one in five women (between 15 and 64 years old) who had ever been in a relationship had experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner at least once in their lifetime. Further to this, three out of four women who had experienced physical and/or sexual violence had encountered severe acts of violence that were likely to cause injury. These include being hit with a fist or something that could hurt; dragged, kicked, or beaten up; threatened or hurt by a gun, knife, or other weapon. The survey also found that women are much more likely to experience frequent acts of violence rather than one‐off incidents. Domestic violence occurrence is not an isolated event, but is a pattern of violative behaviour that women encounter. This includes emotional abuse, with almost one in three (32%) of ‘ever‐partnered’ women aged 15–64 in Cambodia reporting controlling behaviour and/or the threat of harm (MOWA 2015).
In contrast to domestic violence, it is unusual that forced eviction is explicitly framed as gender‐based violence. Forced eviction is viewed as a widespread and systematic human rights violation in Cambodia but is rarely discussed as gender‐based violence. Cambodia is infamous for the scale and brutality of forced evictions occurring in, and beyond, Phnom Penh under the auspices of development. According to WITNESS (2017), at least 30 000 residents of the capital city, Phnom Penh, have been forcibly evicted, and approximately 150 000 Cambodians throughout the country are at risk of forced eviction. Underscoring the magnitude of the issue, between January 2000 and March 2014, the human rights LICADHO (2014a) documented more than 500 000 Cambodians affected by state‐involved land conflicts in investigations covering roughly half the country.
Kaori Izumi’s (2007, p. 12) writing on Southern and East Africa was, until recently, rare in its direct contention that forced eviction ‘represents a form of gender‐based violence in itself, as well as often being accompanied by other acts of extreme violence against women, including physical abuse, harassment, and intimidation, in violation of women’s human rights’. A United Nations (2014a, p. 16) fact sheet on forced eviction now acknowledges that, ‘women often tend to be disproportionately affected and bear the brunt of abuse during forced evictions’. Furthermore, it affirms that forced eviction commonly entails ‘direct and indirect violence against women before, during and after the event’.3 Forced eviction hurts in multiple senses, but is particularly traumatic for women given its targeting of the domestic sphere. As Yorm Bopha, an interviewee activist evocatively told me,
My message is that home is life for women. Even the bird needs a nest. Even corpses need a cemetery. The most important place is home. If we do not have a home, how can we bring up our children?
The point that Yorm Bopha is making is that every woman needs somewhere either to nurture new life or rest their deceased bodies. Forced eviction, however, is a form of gender‐based violence that reduces and unravels women’s capacity to fulfil social reproductive roles that many women value. Although scholastic work collectively