Young rural women’s perceptions of sexual infidelity among men in Cambodia

Abstract

Marriage poses a high risk of HIV infection among Cambodian women due to the country’s double standards regarding extramarital sexual behaviour. Married men are much more likely than married women to engage in extramarital sex, and, among men, such activity is often socially and culturally condoned. Understanding the sexual beliefs young people possess is important as these beliefs may affect their future sexual behaviour and HIV-related risk. This study explored how young women in rural Cambodia conceptualise men’s extramarital affairs. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted in the Khmer language with 43 female high school students in three rural provinces. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes and sub-categories from the participants’ responses. Many participants accepted men’s infidelity and verbally supported traditional cultural beliefs and practices regarding male dominance within sex and relationships. They attributed their future husbands’ infidelity to their own behaviour and/or justified the act as a consequence of work-related mobility. Findings point to the need for new interventions as part of future HIV prevention programmes to increase their effectiveness among young Cambodian adults.

Keywords:

• Young women
• perceptions
• infidelity
• HIV
• Cambodia

Acknowledgement

We thank to Eng Sary who helped in transcribing and translating the original data. We also thank the participants who shared their personal and often sensitive stories.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare no actual or potential conflicts of interest relevant to this manuscript’s subject matter.

Notes

1 The Chbab Srey (Code of Women/Women’s Law) a kind of poem that commends a model for Cambodian women’s familial, societal, marital and maternal behaviours, duties and obligations traditionally passed down from mothers to daughters orally and through official curricula contemporarily. It explicitly teaches women to ‘forgive and be fearful’ of their husbands, to not ‘say anything that treats him as your equal’ and to ‘instead keep silent in order to have peace’. The rule instructs women to remain ‘calm and not offended, not disappointed’ if their husbands have extramarital relations as well as wait patiently until their husbands regain their senses and return home (Anderson and Grace 2018; Grace and Eng 2015; Saing 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Global Research Network program through the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A2A2912566).