LIVING AWAY FROM HOME

Abstract

This paper explores the premarital sexual behaviour and its covariates of young single women working in the garment manufacturing industry in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Because gender and sexuality norms inhibit women from disclosing proscribed lifestyles, measures to mitigate response biases were an integral part of the research design. The prevalence of premarital sex is higher than was previously known, with being older, having a less well-off family background, absence of guardians, peer sexual influence, and leisure and risk behaviour as risk factors. Dating solo—the most proximate behaviour to premarital sex—is engaged in more by women who live without guardians in Phnom Penh, who come from less well-off backgrounds, and who have been exposed to peer sexual influence. Parental influence upon daughters' premarital chastity and partner selection has long been significant. With rural–urban migration, this has been replaced by economic and peer influences, as evident in the high rates of dating, and other leisure and risk behaviour.

Keywords:

• Cambodia
• women
• garment industry
• premarital sex
• urban migration
• peer and parental influence

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the author's PhD thesis, which was completed in 2006 at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, Australian National University, under the supervision of Dr Gordon Carmichael. The author would like to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments to improve this paper.

Notes

1. The respondents were recruited on the basis of workers’ registers, which were obviously obtained from the factory management, and the interviews were conducted within the factory premises.

2. The reviewed studies include national-level studies for Malaysia (Zulkifli & Low 2000), the Philippines (Laguna 2001), Taiwan (Choe & Lin 2001) and Thailand (Podhisita et al. 2001), and a study on factory workers in Bangkok, Thailand (Ford & Kittisuksathit 1996).

3. Based on personal correspondence with one of the authors.

4. The focus groups were organised at the offices of three trade union federations: the Cambodian Federation of Independent Trade Unions, the Cambodian Union Federation and the Free Trade Union of Workers in the Kingdom of Cambodia, which were then implementing legal literacy and women's leadership training courses with technical input from the Union Aid Abroad—APHEDA. Volunteers were sought from these training course participants to participate in 30-minutes focus group discussions on the topics described earlier. The focus group discussions were moderated by the national staff of APHEDA. For the in-depth interviews, two interviewers from the survey were selected for their patience and superiority in interviewing skills. The women who identified themselves as engaged in sex work were asked about their interest in taking part in further interviews, which were planned to take place on the following weekend at the same interview site. All interviews—both focus group-based and individual-based—were tape-recorded with the participants’ permission. They were transcribed in Khmer and translated into English by national staff of the APHEDA within about a week.

5. They are the Cambodian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (CFITU) and the Free Trade Union of Workers of the Kingdom of Cambodia (FTUWKC).

6. For the sake of observing the effects of migration on premarital sex among independent migrants, i.e. those without parents or guardians in Phnom Penh, who were the major interest and focus of this study, a new variable named ‘guardianship (recode)’ was created from the two variables—guardianship and migrant status—and entered into multiple logistic regression analyses instead.

7. Both the old and new school systems were divided into three levels—primary, lower secondary and higher secondary. Under the old system, primary school lasted five years, and was followed by four years of lower and two years of higher secondary school education. Under the new system, primary school now lasts six years, followed by three years of lower and three years of higher secondary school education.