In Cambodia’s prisons, pregnant women and young children are inmates
Since January 2017, there has been an alarming rise in the number of pregnant women and infants incarcerated. Widespread corruption means these impoverished female inmates have little to offer in exchange for their freedom
Last August, 35-year-old Sophea sat on the edge of a wooden bed frame that occupied most of the single-room home she and her husband, Piseth, shared with their five children, who ranged in age from an infant son to an adult daughter.
The smell of burning plastic from a nearby dump wafted into the tiny, tin-roofed house in a slum on the outskirts of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. Since Piseth lost a leg after stepping on a landmine while serving in the Cambodian army, the money from his street begging and Sophea’s ragpicking – about 10,000 riels (US$2.40) a day – had not been enough to make ends meet. Sophea was pregnant with her sixth child.
A railway line separates the slum from a high-security gated complex. The pair often crossed the tracks to scavenge among the refuse of their wealthy neighbours. So when a woman who had arrived in the slum several months earlier, and who always seemed to be a little bit better off than everyone else, showed up with a proposal, a desperate Sophea was willing to listen.
“The woman said she came together with a few others and did pickpocketing in markets,” Sophea says, looking down at the concrete floor of her house while nursing her youngest child. “I joined her to steal people’s wallets, but soon the police caught us and I was in jail, charged with petty theft.”
Most women are incarcerated on small drug and petty theft charges. There are [women] locked up for crimes like stealing a chicken
Naly Pilorge, director of the Cambodian League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights (Licadho), confirms there was a 220 per cent rise in the number of pregnant women and young children in prison between January 2017 and August last year.