Women and Sex Work in Cambodia: Blood, Sweat and Tears by Larissa Sandy (review)

Arriving for the first time in Phnom Penh in early 1998, I found that Cambodia’s capital city was leading Cambodia’s recovery from genocide by offering an array of cheap thrills, low-wage labour opportunities and a circus of international development activities. Opium dens, brothels and bars, stories of illicit arms dealing and an army of white four-wheel-drive vehicles — with prominent organizational logos that advertised their role in the county’s “reconstruction” — characterized the socio-economic landscape of the war-torn nation. Sex was for sale everywhere, and HIV was on everyone’s mind. The first national prevalence study (Ryan et al. 1998, p. 1175) suggested that Cambodia had the highest rate of infection outside of Africa, at about four per cent of the adult population. International funding and public health professionals, including me, poured in, and much of our focus was on sex workers and their clients.

Larissa Sandy describes a remarkably similar encounter with Sihanoukville when she started her fieldwork about five years after my initial visit to the country.

Veering right on the red dirt road behind the port … bright fairy lights … adorned the wooden shanties, twinkling in the night. Ear-splittingly loud karaoke music not only bombarded the senses but also drew customers to the area. In this bustling entertainment district, brothels, karaoke shops, massage and coin rubbing places and one of the town’s biggest nightclubs added to the cacophony. … Sex workers dressed in sexy tight jeans or slinky short skirts … competed with each other to catch the attention of the men passing by.

(p. 66)

While little appeared to have changed during that half-decade, in the early 2000s hysteria over international sex trafficking was about to subsume the panic over HIV. Women and Sex Work in Cambodia ably demonstrates the ways in which Cambodia’s sex industry responds, reacts, and adapts to the shifting sands of social policy. Taking a historical perspective, the book shows that sex work not only persists but also repeatedly refashions itself against the often misconceived efforts to regulate the industry and control or “rescue” individual sex workers.

The book is divided into two parts. The first half presents an excellent historical investigation into commercial sex in Cambodia from the 1870s through the present. The author deftly traces attitudes, practices, and regulatory policies across numerous political regimes during Cambodia’s turbulent history: French colonialism, hereditary monarchy, the Khmer Rouge, Vietnamese occupation, UN oversight, and, most recently, a nascent democratic state. The second part of the book presents an ethnography of the transition between two competing policy agendas towards sex work: harm reduction, meant to address the country’s burgeoning HIV epidemic in the late 1990s, and abolition, meant to combat human trafficking in the 2000s. Sandy’s accounts of interviews with sex workers provide invaluable understanding of the reasons that women sell sex, their perception of their work and their feelings about the various laws, policies and programmes that target them.

History repeating itself is a theme that emerges from the book. The mandatory registration in the colonial era of filles publiques meant to reduce “contamination” (p. 35) among men, re-emerged in 2001 with the introduction of the national 100 Per Cent Condom Use Policy that made sex worker registration through brothels compulsory. Khmer Rouge attempts to eradicate sex work because it did not fit the movement’s view of an ideal communist society echo in violent crackdowns and arrests following the criminalization of sex work in 2008 — also justified on moral grounds — when all sex work was categorized as human trafficking.

Just as the geopolitical conflicts of the Cold War played out in a local proxy war in Cambodia, so, Sandy argues, the introduction there more recently of various HIV prevention and anti-trafficking initiatives made the country an arena in a wider ideological debate unfolding in the boardrooms of USAID, UNAIDS and other international development agencies. Indeed, sex workers appear almost...