A warning to you about this next story: Some will find the content disturbing and it's not appropriate for our youngest listeners. It's also about Cambodia. And it concerns a serious and growing problem, the gang rape of young men and girls. Critics say the government is doing little to stop it. It's a small village with a few hundred families. She's too ashamed to tell me her last name. Tuk-tuks and food vendors meander pass on the street outside. At the wedding, this man asked me to dance and I agree.
And I went to dance with him. He led her from the wedding to a field nearby. MAO Through translator : When he dragged me out, there was his two friends with him and the three were waiting in the fields. Now just eight days later, she's telling her story from a safe house. What happened to Mao has a name in Cambodia: bauk. Its literal translation means plus; but it also means gang rape, a chilling social phenomenon among young men in the city.
A few years ago, a local non-governmental organization put together a video of victims and perpetrators. The voice is distorted to hide her identity. The next morning, she said she called the police but they told her she had no evidence.
David Wilkinson ph and his colleagues were studying condom usage among college boys in when they found that bauk was a socially accepted form of recreation for young middle-class Khmer men. Then they would take her to a guest house to have sex. And when they got there, they would have arranged for between four and 10 of their friends to be waiting.
And they would coerce or try and induce the woman to have sex with all of them. Very often she was verbally or physically abused and would then be subsequently gang raped. And we've got stories of school girls, garment factory workers, middle-class young women being gang raped. But other bauk victims, like Mao, do come.
