Debt Bondage in Cambodia’s Past—and Implications for Its Present

Abstract

In the Cambodian past, strict guidelines detailed punishments and compensatory arrangements should laws concerning the treatment of persons temporarily entered into debt bondage be transgressed. Although the legal protections that these permitted were abolished by the French colonial administration, the practices themselves remained. Not all “slaves” were condemned to a life of servitude; often, individuals or their families entered into contracts in which their labor was pledged for a set period. Daughters’ labor could most easily be given up by families seeking to borrow a lump sum from a wealthy patron. When laws protecting such girls were removed, there was no longer any effective barrier preventing their temporary masters and mistresses from abusing them. The initial failure of colonial legislators to understand debt bondage as distinct from slavery explains the endurance of human trafficking and the proliferation of increasingly younger children in the sex sector in Cambodia today.

1. ¹Women face more difficulties than men in of approaching banks and international organizations for loans because of their lower levels of education as well as social constraints toward female entrepreneurship (World Bank, 2009, pp. 3–4).

Notes

1. ¹Women face more difficulties than men in of approaching banks and international organizations for loans because of their lower levels of education as well as social constraints toward female entrepreneurship (World Bank, 2009, pp. 3–4).

2. ²For an overview of slavery in premodern Cambodia, see Jacobsen (2005).

3. ³We can only imagine the nature of activities that preceded naming a male slave “Mischievous penis” in the same inscription.

4. ⁴Many scholars who engage with the colonial period in Southeast Asia have commented upon this. See, for example, Cooper (2001, pp. 135–136), Edwards (1998, pp. 109–110), and Jacobsen (2008). For a colonial-era example, see Malleret (1934, pp. 219–220).

5. ⁵The necessity of appeasing the girl’s meba, ancestral spirits, was common after sexual intercourse between unmarried people in precolonial and colonial Cambodia. See Jacobsen (2008, p. 96).

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Notes on contributors

Trude Jacobsen

Trude Jacobsen, Ph.D., is Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for History in Public Policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine 2013–2014 and Associate Professor in the Center for NGOs and Leadership Development and the Department of History at Northern Illinois University. She has written extensively on issues of gender, sexuality, and power in the Cambodian past and present and regularly consults for NGOs and governments on minority rights and marginalized groups in mainland Southeast Asia.