Couples Not Forced to Marry, Expert Testifies
After more than two weeks in which no hearings took place because of national holidays and flooding at the court, the Chamber resumed its hearings today. Expert witness Peg LeVine commenced her testimony in relation to forced marriage. Under questioning of the Defense Counsel for Khieu Samphan Anta Guissé, she put forward that the people who she had interviewed were not forced to marry and that, although love was not seen as a factor to be taken into account when organizing marriages, this was also not the case under arranged marriages prior to 1975. She also submitted that despite the instructions to consummate their marriages during Democratic Kampuchea, few couples followed these instructions. Moreover, she pointed out that even internationally, the consummation of marriage was expected implicitly or explicitly.
Preliminary Issues
Due to flooding in front of the court and on National Road 4, the hearing began with one our of delay. At the beginning of the session, oral submissions and responses regarding documents that were requested to be admitted for today’s expert testimony were heard. Moreover, Trial Chamber President Nil Nonn had returned to the bench after weeks of absence due to health reasons. After the submissions and responses related to requests to admit documents, the Nuon Chea Defense Team announced that they did not consider 2-TCW-960 any longer as relevant and therefore requested to withdraw this witness.[1] Following a question by Judge Jean-Marc Lavergne, Nuon Chea Defense Counsel Victor Koppe explained that he did not consider the witness relevant for their theory of the case anymore. Judge Lavergne put forward that, the ECCC not being a common law system, the witness had become a Chamber witness and that Rule 87 (4) still needed to be fulfilled. It therefore needed to be established that the witness was not relevant to the case as such. International Co-Prosecutor Nicholas Koumjian submitted that albeit being relevant to the case, the witness could mostly offer duplicative information. He therefore did not consider it necessary to call that witness. International Civil Party Lead Co-Lawyer Marie Guiraud said that they relied on the discretion of the Chamber for this matter. The President then announced that a break would be taken to decide on the matters.
The Expert: Peg LeVine
After the break, the President announced that both requests for admitting documents were granted. Next, the expert’s testimony began. Australian-American Ms. Peg LeVine was born on January 21, 1952. She currently resides in Victoria, Australia, and is a registered clinical psychologist, an anthropologist with a focus on medical anthropology, a professor and a research affiliate at the Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research in Los Angeles.
Education and Early Research
She received her Bachelor of Science in Sociology in 1994, her Master Degree in Psychology in 1996, her doctorate in psychology with a focus on trauma studies in 1984, and another doctorate in 2007.
She first came to Cambodia in 1985 and 1986, during which she discussed the possibility to set up cross-cultural sociology courses at the university with one of her Cambodian students Hem Ma Yang. Her first visit lasted approximately two weeks.
Her first personal enquiry in Cambodia and Democratic Kampuchea took place in 1980 when she worked in a mental health center. Some of her clients were refugees who came to the United States and she thus started reading about Cambodia. This was when she first heard about weddings. She commenced her formal research in 1997. Her interest was further triggered when she met with colleagues who were married to each other and seemed affectionate and kind. They had met and married under Democratic Kampuchea and had not been forced to marry. This challenged her perception that people who married under the Khmer Rouge were forced to marry. She further met people at Ta Khmao and wanted to understand how she came to believe that weddings were forced. She consequently conducted thorough investigations that included reading political documents. She stated that other research regarding this topic was often biased. For example, she conducted research at the French cultural center and read cartographer reports and the like. She also attempted to map weddings that took place before 1970. She pursued her PhD degree to be able to have sufficient time and resources to conduct independent research. David Chandler agreed to supervise her work after her previous supervisors had left the university. This meant that she had to get ethic clearance on her work again.
Her thesis was entitled A Contextual Study into the Weddings and Births under the Khmer Rouge: The Ritual Revolution. She lived on the scholarship she had received, but sometimes used private funds. Moreover, she accepted a position as a full professor in Japan for one to two years and received grants for travelling to Cambodia. Her survey consisted of 192 formal respondents for studies, but she also often talked to elders who described to her the rituals that existed prior to Khmer Rouge. She had filmed these encounters and brought the respective video and audio tapes with her.
At this point, the President adjourned the hearing for a break.
Research Methodology
After the lunch break, the President announced that the maintained the decision to call 2-TCW-960. The floor was then granted to the Khieu Samphan Defense Counsel to put questions to the expert. Ms. Anta Guissé asked about the differences between her thesis and her book. Ms. Levin explained that there were 178 reference in thesis and 184 references in her book. [2] She also said that some new publications had been published that she therefore referred to in her book. Her thesis had more samples and data included. There was less detail regarding literature review and her steps through which she came to her conclusions in her book.
Ms. Guissé asked whether she applied the research methods as followed in philosophy, medical anthropology and sociology, or whether she focused on one specific research method.[3] Ms. LeVine explained that her research was multi-disciplinary. However, she followed the research steps, especially in the beginning, of ethnographical research through her anthropological research.
She explained that one could obtain a doctorate in philosophy by specifying in a specific area. It corresponded to the American PhD. She explained that when her Cambodian colleagues challenged her through their lived experience and that she had to do more research. The couple wanted to marry when they met each other in a camp. They were told that they had to marry under a Christian ceremony in order to receive particular refugee services. This personal experience made her to conduct research about the term “forced marriage”.
She underwent three phases in her qualitative research:
- choosing the sample with two criteria: couples who were together to interview them individually and see where they agreed; second, those who were married in Cambodia and had no refugee status
- selective sampling (in contrast to judgmental sampling): couples who were married under the Khmer Rouge to understand how they experienced the weddings by asking non-leading questions.
- She snowballed her sample: couples who were married under the Democratic Kampuchea who were married in villages that had different leaders; she focused on the Central Zone and Southwest Zone.
Her first couple challenged the word forced. She met with the first couple for around three years. She filmed them to collect visual and audio data. She wanted to triangulate multistage sampling based data. Prior to this, she had only seen content-based data collection in this field.
She said she realized that “placed history stimulates memory” and that the content of the stories changed when she travelled with them to the locations of their memory. “Did it change their stories? Yes, it did”. She worked with a psychologist to ensure that they had psychological support in the follow-up of her interview.
She explained that sometimes taking funds would compromise neutral research. Thus, she did not want to be associated with any Non-Governmental Organizations in Cambodia. She said tha the discussion had been heated due to the sensitivity: “I felt that heat very early on.” She attempted to stay neutral as much as possible. “I was experiencing the intensity of that topic”. The more the topic came onto the agenda, the more people she interviewed started to feel ashamed.
Turning back to her first sample of 22 people in one location, Ms. Guissé asked whether she conducted her research with all couples in the same way as with the first couple. She ended the sample by saturation, which was how she also ended her second sample: she finished the sample when she started receiving a repetition of themes. For example, there were differences in the wedding ceremonies according to leaders. She developed her questions through the first couple. These questions included, for example, to ask the subjects to describe the marriage, “what protected you”, to describe the pregnancy and the first few days following the delivery. When conducting her first interview, Ms. LeVine became sick and women cared for her. When she asked them whether this was how they got taken care of during their pregnancy under the Khmer Rouge, the women denied this. One took her to where the delivery took place, which was how she reached her method of taking interviewees to the places of memory.
Content of her Research
She interviewed “well over a thousand” people in the villages. They were mostly not married during the Democratic Kampuchea, but were elders who spoke to her about the weddings prior to the Khmer Rouge.
Ms. Guissé quoted part of her thesis, in which she had said that it may be misleading to classify marriages under Democratic Kampuchea as forced in context of a country where people were arranged to be married prior to this.[4] Reacting to Ms. Nakagawa’s statement that marriages were family affairs, she said that it was more a community affair. Some ethnographic studies noticed differences in terms of times that was taken for the wedding ceremonies in arranged marriages. Some communities took one day, others up to seven days. Moreover, she was interested in the sequence of events at the ceremonies. There were profound differences between the wedding ceremonies.
Based on the experiences described to her, she said that she came to the conclusion that they were not forced, since permission was sought and sometimes given to relatives, who then went to leaders in the village. “They were usually in agreement”.
As for her interpreter, she said that she had an independent translator. Her first interpreter was a survivor himself, which was why she had a second translator who did not live in the country. The second translator translated it without reading the first transcript of the other interpreter. She used students of Royal University of Phnom Penh to assist her. They were not her students and only volunteers. She trained them how not conduct interviews and how to not add questions other than asking to elaborate on certain issues more. She collected random samples of the 102 samples that the students drew to make a reliability check on their work. Only one quarter of the students recorded the interviews.
At this point, the President adjourned the hearing for a break.
Consummation of Marriage
She initially interviewed 11 couples. She then interviewed 90 couples. The 90 couples included the 11 couples and her students conducted an additional 102, which added to a total of the 192. A large number of couples in her sample were married in Kandal.[5] After the initial period after the Khmer Rouge took power, wedding ceremonies were held differently. There were two different procedures, she said, to conduct research in anthropology: emic – which looked at a society or culture from the inside – and etic – which examined a culture from the outside. She said that she tried to conduct emic studies as much as possible. She explained that she had to “take her views from love and other notions what it is that creates a partnership” and instead listen to her interviewees. She said that the appearance of spouses, “it really was inconsequential for the kindness”. People were bonded together by experiences of founding a family together and being able to “kindly touch” someone. “They never, in my sample […], I didn’t have anyone say, because I didn’t love that person, I was forced to marry”.
“Traditionally, there is an engagement period, sometimes it’s called half period. […] After that half-marriage, a wedding is proceeded”. This would, traditionally, take place outside rainy season. She explained that couples said that there were some cases in which leaders allowed people to marry those who had previously been engaged. Ms. Kazumi Nakagawa had, in contrast to her method, focused on women and therefore a gender-biased research.
Ms. Guissé asked how many typical ways there were under the Khmer Rouge.[6] She said that there might have been, depending on time and space, around seven different procedures. She had attempted to collect as much evidence as possible through her questionnaires.
As for her research regarding leaders, she said that she “did not conduct my research as a witch hunt”. She was asked to give the name of a leader by DC-Cam on time, but refused to do so. She did not want to want to participate in naming perpetrators.
Ms. Guissé then asked about sexual intercourse and read out a quote during which Ms. LeVine had said that around 40 percent were instructed to engage in sexual intercourse.[7] Ms. LeVine explained that of these 39.9 percent around 0.09 percent had reported compliance of this order. Of those, half of them knew each other before. There were a number of talks about sexual activities through, for example, by asking about the ability to fertilize fields. She said that also in the Western world, “one expectation of the marriage is the consummation of the marriage”. She pointed out, however, that some of it under the Khmer Rouge was “distasteful”. “Nobody in my sample said the next day they asked”, and no one in her sample was threatened with death if they did not consummate their marriage.
“Most people said that it was just expected” that they would have children for their parents. In the Roman Catholic Church, she said, not consummating the marriage within the first year could be grounds for annulment. Traditionally, it was expected that people would consummate their marriage in the first three days.
Of those people who got marriage, 0.08 percent went to these “honeymoon huts” that existed. If people were able to go to their parents’ home, they would go there. The people who went in there were those who had no family to go there. As for the change in wedding ceremonies and the following expectations, she asked: “What was the purpose of that? Was it of about a reconstitution of how weddings were supposed to happen? I’m not sure.”
The more communal systems of living were built, it seemed the more huts were built around that area, she said. She said that this raised the question whether these huts were part of a new communal living or not.
The President adjourned the hearing. It will continue tomorrow, October 11, 2016, at 9 am with the testimony of Ms. LeVine.
[1] E/29/48/a1
[2] E3/1794, Thesis;
[3] E3/433.1.
[4] E3/1794, at 00482443 (EN).
[5] E3/1794, at 00482430 (EN), page 8.
[6] E3/1794, at 00482481 (EN).
[7] E3/1794, at 00482538 (EN).
Featured Image: Expert witness Peg LeVine.