The
country where Valentine’s Day is the most dangerous day of the year
Cambodia
can’t get enough of Valentine’s Day. There are many reasons for this, both
cultural as well as linguistic. For starters, Cambodians can be melodramatic
when it comes to matters of the heart. Photo ops, like
this one, aren’t uncommon. And then there’s the syntax. Valentine’s Day
hints at a very important Khmer word: songsar.
It’s often
loosely translated as “sweetheart.” Or sometimes “valentine.” But those
don’t really get at the complexities of the word. A better translation would be
something along the lines of “someone I think I’m going to marry” or “someone I
want to marry.” And therein lies the problem. Because when some Cambodians
think of Valentine’s Day, they think of that songsar,
and expect they’re going to have sex with them. Whether it’s consensual or not,
research
suggests.
Cambodia
already has a fairly significant problem with rape. According
to United Nations research, one in five Cambodian men admit to raping a
woman at least once. Half of that number started
before the age of 20. And nearly two-thirds said they had raped their partner,
or more explicitly, their songsar.
Valentine’s
Day only exacerbates that trend, government officials say. “This year, we are
asking teachers to properly advise their students,” Education Minister Hang
Chuon Naron told
the Cambodia Daily. “Stop thinking anymore about Valentine’s Day. Buying
flowers for each other is fine, but if it is meant to move beyond friendship
and lose one’s virginity — that is not right.”
Teenage sex
is nothing out of the ordinary, to be sure. But Cambodia’s unique
confluence of factors — an already high rate of rape as well as a bad
translation that implies one is supposed to take the virginity of
one’s songsar — has turned
Valentine’s Day into a day of rape, government officials say.
“Valentine’s
Day is the day that they shall sacrifice their bodies for sweethearts and cause
the loss of personal and family dignity,” the Ministry of Education, Youth and
Sport warned last
year, according to the Cambodia Daily. “Valentine’s Day is Western culture, a
foreign culture. Boys can exploit Valentine’s Day and take advantage of girls,
while girls sometimes are confused about what their role is on Valentine’s Day.
Valentine’s Day exposes the youth to rape.”
Prominent
opposition position Mu Sochua said that reasoning was nonsense. Beer,
she said, is also of a foreign culture. But the government has made no moves to
warn people about beer: “Does more sexual assault occur as a result of alcohol
or Valentine’s Day?”
While she does have a point — and Cambodians do drink a lot of beer — she’s
missing a troubling pattern borne out in a recent batch of surveys. Burrowing
deeper into this trend was Tong Soprach. He’s
a public health specialist as well as a columnist for the Phnom Penh Post. He
began researching Valentine’s Day and sex back in 2009, and kept it up through
2014, achieving a longitudinal data set.
He
interviewed 715 Cambodians, aged 15 to 24, and what he found was staggering. In
2009, roughly two-thirds of young males said
they were willing to force their partners to have sex on Valentine’s Day. That
number dropped some by 2014, but was still alarmingly high: among
376 male respondents, about 47 percent. As Vice commented,
“Obviously, the sample size was pretty small, but that’s still a lot of guys
who are all too happy to admit they’d be up for topping their Valentine’s off
with a night of non-consensual sex.”
The
respondents had any number of methods, the survey found. “I will say to her if
we don’t have sex we don’t really love each other, to try to get her to agree.”
Or: “I will pressure her by taking her far from town to try to have sex with
her.” More common was this answer: “I will give her an expensive gift with the
aim of having sex with her.”
The findings
corroborated anecdotes published in some newspapers. In early 2013, the Phnom
Penh Post published a story called “What young Cambodians expect from
Valentine’s Day.” It focused on a young female high school student with a crush
on a classmate. So on Valentine’s Day, she folded a sheet of paper into the
shape of a star and gave it to him.
“That same
day, he asked to me to make love with him,” she told the paper. “Because I
loved him, I agreed. Then, within a couple of months, he had another
girlfriend. … It was the most terrible experience of my life.”
Many young
Cambodians, researcher Tong said, neither understand the “background of
Valentine’s Day,” nor the fact that one doesn’t need to have sex
regardless of a partner’s wishes. “There has been a shift among Cambodian youth
from viewing the day as a celebration of love to simply being a catalyst for
sex,” he told the
Phnom Penh Post.
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