Creator

Theresa de Langis

Scholar of women, peace and security who leads the Cambodian Women's Oral History Project.

Theresa de Langis (ថេរីសា ឌីលែនហ្គីស) is a Phnom Penh scholar of women, peace and security who leads the Cambodian Women's Oral History Project.[1][2] Her work records the testimony of women who survived the Khmer Rouge regime, and she has written on the prosecution of sexual violence committed in those years.[3]

Career

De Langis earned a doctorate in literary theory and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2001. She then headed the agency of the Commission on the Status of Women in New Hampshire, where she worked on legislative and policy reform.[4] In 2008 she joined the United Nations mission in Afghanistan as Deputy Director of Programmes for UNIFEM, now UN Women, and served there until 2010. Other United Nations assignments followed, most of them in Asia.[4] Her field is women's human rights in conflict and post-conflict settings, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region.[3]

She moved to Cambodia full-time in 2012 and has been based in Phnom Penh since then.[4][1] She began teaching part-time at the American University of Phnom Penh soon after it opened in 2013 and joined full-time in 2016. In 2017 she led the launch of its Center for Southeast Asian Studies, which she directs. She is a professor of Global Affairs and Literature, and her teaching includes genocide studies, literature, global affairs and gender studies.[4]

Cambodian Women's Oral History Project

The Cambodian Women's Oral History Project (ប្រវត្តិសាស្រ្តដែលនិយាយដោយស្រ្តីកម្ពុជា) collects the life stories of women who survived the Khmer Rouge regime.[5] De Langis created it and runs it from Phnom Penh with Cambodian students and young graduates, and it is self-funded.[1][5] Full-time interviewing was planned to begin in January 2013.[6] She led the interviews herself and edited the English translations, and the project has gathered testimonies from across the country.[2][1] The accounts include sexual and gender-based violence under the regime.[7]

The project put the survivors first in how it collected testimony about sexual violence, and it paid attention to the long-term harm of those crimes. An informal advisory group of local organizations working on human rights, reconciliation and testimonial therapy helped weigh ethical and research questions in a Cambodian setting. Most of the narrators could not read, so illustrations by a Cambodian artist became part of the final design.[6] The testimonies are published online under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.[5] Her Khmer files and transcripts are held at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum for public use.[4]

Justice and forced marriage

De Langis followed the proceedings of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, and carried out independent research on sexual violence during Democratic Kampuchea (1975 to 1979).[4] She has worked to raise awareness of sexual crimes committed under the regime, including through work connected with the ECCC, and she co-authored a briefing paper on the issue for the court.[3] In 2014 she wrote "A Missed Opportunity, A Last Hope? Prosecuting Sexual Crimes Under the Khmer Rouge Regime." That October she co-authored "Like Ghost Changes the Body": The Impact of Forced Marriage under the Khmer Rouge Regime with Judith Strasser, Thida Kim and Taing Sopheap.[3] In her paper in the Cambodia Law and Policy Journal she argues that the regime's Code #6, its rule against moral offenses, was not mainly a rule against rape. In her reading it made sexual abuse of women easier and kept victims from seeking justice.[3]

In 2016 she said that advocates had pressed the tribunal to include gender crimes, which led to forced marriage and rape within marriage being heard in Case 002/2.[8] After the tribunal's verdict in November 2018, she said it had ended the long-held belief that sexual violence was not part of the Khmer Rouge's mass atrocities, and that the women who testified about forced marriage had changed legal history.[9] In a 2025 interview she said that about 70 percent of the women she interviewed had refused a forced marriage at least once, and that 97 percent were forced to marry in the end because continued refusal could mean re-education.[10]

Her oral histories on forced marriage became the basis for Sophiline Cheam Shapiro's traditional Khmer opera Pka Sla Krom Angkar. The ECCC selected the opera as an official reparation for victims.[4] In 2022 she was writing a book about forced marriage and the experiences of its survivors.[4]

Works


See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Cambodian Women's Oral History Project, About
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Cambodian Women's Oral History Project, testimony page with interview credits (March 15, 2013)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Cambodia Law and Policy Journal, article by Theresa de Langis
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 American University of Phnom Penh, Meet Dr. Theresa de Langis (April 18, 2022)
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Cambodian Women's Oral History Project, Life Stories of Survival under the Khmer Rouge Regime
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Oral History, ASIA, CAMBODIA: Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, & Wives (August 12, 2013)
  7. ↑ Theresa de Langis, about.me
  8. ↑ The Diplomat, The Forced Pregnancies of the Khmer Rouge (December 13, 2016)
  9. ↑ Inside Story, While the world looked away (November 19, 2018)
  10. ↑ Radio Free Asia, 50 years on, a Cambodian bride remembers her forced marriage (April 16, 2025)
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This page was last edited on 26 September 2026, at 23:43.