'You should always highly obey your husband'

Aid to developing countries is one of the simplest ideas to sell, and probably one of the most complex tasks to execute effectively. I’ve recently found myself working in gender and development in one of Asia’s most backward nations - Cambodia - and I can’t help having more questions than answers each day about the real priorities in aid.

Cambodia, like most Asian countries, has strict traditions about the way they believe women should behave. In Cambodia specifically, there is a Women's Code - the Chhbap Srey (literally, “Women’s law”) - an unwritten set of instructions taught to girls and boys in the classroom about how a woman should behave, with special focus on her attitude towards her husband.

It is taught as a legend: as the mythical Queen Intravattey instructs her daughter on how to conduct herself upon reaching the world of humans.

Excerpts from a recently written version of the code include the following:

You are to remember that you are the only personal servant of your husband and you should always highly obey your husband. Obey the three fires:

1. Take care of his parents properly. Feed and afford them what they want.
2. Fulfill the sexual desire of your husband. You should fulfill this task perfectly and don't upset him. You should be humble and don't consider him as equal as you. Do not tell your mother of what your husband asks.
3. Don't mind what your husband says. Don't try to revenge or protest against your husband.

You should not touch your husband's head without asking permission or forgiveness. When sleeping, don't turn your back to the husband. If you do so, it seems like a serpent stays up in the house, poisons everyone and separates you from you husband.

Perhaps this sets the social context for what UNIFEM (the United Nations Development Fund for Women) entered into, when it arrived in 2002: a stack of freshly printed protocols and provisions from the UN gender convention tucked under its arm.

Cambodia signed and ratified CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) in 1992. On paper, Cambodia is an extremely good international citizen. It signs and ratifies most treaties that it is asked to. It doesn't mean that these international treaties make it into domestic law. And if they do, it doesn't mean anything necessarily changes outside on the street.

The experts blame the culture of violence brought about during the reign of the Khmer Rouge for the high levels of rape, domestic violence and trafficking of women that still takes place in Cambodia.

Maybe this is justified. Maybe it’s a good excuse to give to the international community that no one is cold-hearted enough to challenge. The Chhbap Srey would suggest that discriminative attitudes to women hark back to an era prior to the 1975 Khmer Rouge regime.

There is no doubt that gender discrimination, in its excesses, exists in Cambodia. But is our outrage over the gender issue a product of Western privilege?

In developed countries, such as our own, there has always been a correlation between periods of peace and prosperity with progression towards gender equality. The campaign for female suffrage took place in Australia during a period of comparative affluence and stability before World War I.

The third wave feminists of the Germaine Greer era again made their advances for wage equality, the recognition of unpaid labour and sexual equality after the instability and economic pressures of World War II concluded. Essentially, advances in gender equality have historically been the preserve of societies that were stable and affluent enough for a realignment of women’s economic and social roles.

In contrast, 40 per cent of Cambodians still live below the poverty line. Officially the unemployment rate is roughly 20.3 per cent; unofficially I am told it is much higher. The uneducated (mainly women) suffer the worst from unemployment, but they are not the only ones. Educated people are often out of work too.

Most of the country still lives off subsistence agriculture. The birth mortality rate is still very high and mono-nutritional diseases from a rice-predominant diet are still extremely common, as are diseases resulting from the consumption of unclean drinking water. And then there are the landmine victims. You could be mistaken for thinking gender equality is not at the top of Cambodia's To Do list.

Can we take ourselves seriously, we affluent egalitarians, most of whom have never suffered considerably in the gender discrimination stakes, storming in and demanding gender equality?

Australia came around to gender equality in its own time; even organically, you could argue. And maybe Cambodia should be allowed to do the same. Perhaps the resources being poured into expensive round tables in New York - where gender experts from around the globe interrogate Cambodia's Minister for Women's Affairs - could be better directed into providing training and equipment for setting up more rural medical facilities, to reduce the number of home births, or perhaps increased spending on civil engineering and hence water sanitisation.

This argument makes sense on several levels. But it has its own inherent flaws. It appeals to an either-or idea of aid, which is too simple in itself to be accurate.

Cambodia has more NGOs per capita than any other nation on earth. Central Phnom Penh is NGO city; the streets lined with brightly coloured offices all espousing their particular angle in the effort to drag Cambodia into the 21st century.

Over a third of Cambodia's GDP is aid money, which some people see as a significant problem in itself. If there are enough resources to push for gender equality along with health, education and law reforms, is there any reason to question it?

There is no reason gender issues should not be pushed and legislated for along with the efforts of more general development programs focused on food, water, landmines and fighting corruption.

In fact, in a country in such a swift period of transition and development, legislating and introducing gender equality norms now may save difficult battles against more established, more entrenched forms of gender discrimination later on.

For example, one of UNIFEM’s projects is the training and support for female candidates to run in the commune council elections for 2007. The bar has been set very high for Cambodia in terms of gender representation at a political level; it is being proposed that quotas of 30 per cent of political party positions be reserved for women.

Similar quotas have been successfully implemented at lower levels of the political spectrum. It is hoped that if, in these early days of Cambodia's democratic political system, these standards are introduced, women will be there to guard against the development of any boy's club that seeks to renew and protect itself from female infiltration: a recognisable trait in political parties in most countries around the globe.
 
Perhaps this is the best step forward for institutionalising gender equality. Perhaps it isn’t.

There is an inherent assumption that women will, by nature, seek to push forth issues for gender equality once within government. There is not much evidence to support this theory.

It has been argued, as justification for inclusion of women in political circles, that women are more peace loving and hence more prone to negotiate before entering into conflict than men. The argument is problematic because it enforces the idea that women and men actually think differently, which is part of the original prejudice that has kept women from positions of power.

Anyone who will argue that Margaret Thatcher and Condoleezza Rice are more peace loving, and Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are more prone to war, strictly on the basis of their gender, is going to have a tough time.

If women are to be represented, it should be because they make up 50 per cent of the population, are 50 per cent of the people who get affected by war and every other major political decision, and so should have 50 per cent of the say.

It's also true in Cambodia's (and the world's) experience so far that women do not necessarily vote for women. The introduction of universal suffrage has never guaranteed a sudden increase in female representation in politics. So, while providing support and training for women candidates is a significant step in creating a broader representation of the community at the electoral level, its success will be only as widespread as the attitudes within the community allow.

Perhaps improvements in gender equality can contribute to the Cambodia’s development in other ways. If women are less bound to traditional roles, caring for both the children and her parents-in-law; she can contribute to society in other capacities.

But it's a flip-side argument. Unless there are other social mechanisms to cover her prime position as carer (for example, compulsory education, health care for elderly people, and so on) and for subsistence farmers (farming technology that can farm at economies of scale, and rescue half of society from the struggle to produce food), then escaping the women's role laid out in the Chhbap Srey is just a pipe dream.

It is fair to say that, for countries like Cambodia, under the auspices of NGOs, international aid donors and the UN, there is tremendous external pressure for change. Countries like Afghanistan, East Timor, Iraq and the Solomon Islands hold mixed messages for how much change can be forced upon developing world nations in short periods of time.

Perhaps, in this environment, external pressure to transform a cultural understanding of the woman and her rights can be successful. Or perhaps the young 21st century Cambodia is still too entrenched in poverty, with traditional roles for women strongly governed by that poverty, to make these changes yet. It is too early to tell.