Eid celebrations and Tunisian history lessons

A lot of focus has been put on collecting material for my thesis these past few weeks. I have spoken to an immense amount of people and officially interviewed 11 people who fit the restrictions of my study. I have been positively surprised by the information that has been shared with me. Although many people are tired and sad about the situation they are in politically, economically and socially, many are still hopeful. Many people still believe in Tunisia and in change. They are not completely oblivious and know that it will take time for the change to come but they welcome it and believe it to be possible.

As for the Eid celebrations, I have never witnessed anything like it. Everyone was going from house to house to visit relatives and celebrate together. The area I am in was full with people celebrating, which I was informed always happens. I also got to see Fathia, she is a camel and her job has been to bring water from the well for the people in the city for about 25 years. Today she is retired and still seen as an important part of La Marsa and can be found in Saf Saf during the day and out by the beach in the morning hours.

Fathia

I also went on a walk through Carthage this week and it was incredible. Walking through the city and seeing ruins that have been incorporated through the city. I went to the cathedral, the Cathédrale Saint-Louis de Carthage which is today known as the Acropolium. It is no longer used as a place of worship, but for events. It was built between 1884 and 1890 under the French protectorate and Hussein II Bey.

Cathédrale Saint-Louis de Carthage, today known as the Acropolium

On my way back I stumbled upon the North Africa American Cemetery and Memorial. The cemetery contains approximately 3000 soldiers from World War II. It was so serene and calm there but I still had a feeling of unease being so close to those who fought in the second World War. It was a truly amazing experience.

Map of North Africa during World War II. Located at the North Africa American Cemetery and Memorial.

All monuments in Carthage have free entrance on the first Sunday of every month which means I’ll see you next week with more pictures and information about Carthage.

A Holy Month in Tunisia!

This week marks my fourth week in Tunisia. It has been incredible so far. Nice weather and scenery and incredibly nice people.

Before travelling I got a good head start on my thesis which is something I would recommend doing. Having good background knowledge about the country and not just what you want to study is incredibly important and has helped me out a lot.

For the past four weeks I have been busy exploring the area I am living in, which is a suburban area of the capital of Tunis, called La Marsa.

During this month the holy month of Ramadan has been going on. Ramadan is the month in which it is said that the Quran was revealed to the prophet Mohammed (pbuh). During Ramadan, Muslims refrain from eating and drinking from dusk till dawn, and they dedicate their time to God by praying and reading the Quran and performing good deeds. People usually break their fast with dates and water and the dinner usually contains soup, salad and a main dish. During the day, hardly any restaurants or fast food places are open. It has been incredible to experience Ramadan here. I have been invited to break fast with people I have gotten to know throughout my stay which I am truly grateful for. This week is the last week of Ramadan, making Eid al Ftir, or just Eid as they call it here, only a few days away. Eid is the first day of the new month after Ramadan in the Islamic calendar. It is a celebration of the end of fasting and Ramadan which I am excited about.

I have conducted several interviews with locals which has been an amazing experience and eye opener. People are extremely nice, accommodating and understanding and actually want to share their stories and perspectives. I have gained so much knowledge about the country and the situation the people are in. Although they highlight many problems they see, they have all been hopeful that the country will change for the better.

I would highly recommend visiting Tunisia. People are incredibly nice and there is so much history. Since it is Ramadan it has been harder to explore the country as many things are closed, however, I plan on doing plenty of exploring starting next week, when everything is back to normal. I will share more as time goes.

A warm welcome to Mexico!

Hi there!

It has been a long flight but here I am! Enjoying the beauty of this country, its food, people and an amazing weather…

I’m finally in Veracruz, the city where I’m conducting my research. The city is located in the southeast of the country, next to the Gulf of Mexico.

Exploring the downtown of Veracruz.
Exploring the downtown of Veracruz.

Food has been the best welcome to this city: picadas, gorditas, empanadas, tamales… everything is delicious!

The temperature during this season is quite warm comparing to Sweden, it is around 28°C . So I couldn’t miss visiting the beach and the Aquarium of Veracruz.

My best picture so far! Aquarium of Veracruz.
Aquarium of Veracruz.

I’ll post more pictures of the fieldwork very soon!

Please feel free to comment… I’ll be happy to hear from you all!

Best,

Ana.

Week 6: Transcribing and Quotes from Interviews

This week we have continued to transcribe our interviews. Below are some examples of how child victims of sexual exploitation and abuse are perceived and treated in Cambodia:

The respondent continue to describe issues with medical examinations of child victims post exposure to sexual exploitation and abuse:

Child victims are stigmatised by medical professionals, community members, and their own families, which causes secondary victimisation.

The respondent continues to point out key issues associated with poverty in regard to child sexual exploitation and abuse:

Finally, we would like to thank everyone who have donated to our fundraiser so far! The engagement is heartwarming. For the ones who would like to contribute, SWISH 0737353530 and mark it with “APLE”. Thank you!

APLE’s work: solely based on donations.

Dear reader,

If this is the first post you read, here is a little update.

We (Elin & Hanna) are currently in Cambodia to write our bachelor’s thesis in criminology and are fortunate to collaborate with the organization APLE. Their works against the sexual exploitation and abuse of children and enables, among other things, the prosecution of perpetrators and rehabilitates vulnerable children. Children’s exposure is commonly a result of sex tourism, which rarely leads to any significant consequences for perpetrators.

Together with you, we hope to contribute to their continued work against sexual exploitation and abuse through a fundraiser. If you are you able to donate any amount this month, we would be extremely grateful for the contribution. Every little bit makes a difference! (All contributions goes in full to APLE https://aplecambodia.org/ )

To donate, send a SWISH with the message “APLE” to 0737353530.

Thank you!

Week 5: Transcribing

At the beginning of this week we temporarily said goodbye to the staff at APLE for a two week transcription period away.

We decided to go to a quiet and calm island, Koh Rong Samloem, to transcribe. Phnom Penh has been very crowded and noisy which has affected our sleep. The environment here is not too bad!

The transcription process has been surprisingly valuable to us; it included a lot of information that got lost during the interviews. Due to a great amount of new information and some difficulties hearing, we were not able to apprehend all details at the time of the interviews.

A story from the interviews that touched us this week:

Next week we will continue to write and transcribe!

Week 3 & 4: A Supreme Court Trial

During week 3, we had the opportunity to interview two more respondents at APLE. We experienced some difficulties in terms of language barriers, yet, we received valuable information about APLE’s work! We also finished writing the compulsory parts of the thesis, as the deadline was closing in.

This week, we were invited by APLE to join a Supreme Court Trial.

Their case included a 39 year old British offender, previously convicted with “indecent assault” (e.g. sexual touching) of a 13 year old Cambodian girl (his sister in law’s daughter). He had spent 2 out of 2,5 years in prison and appealed his conviction with the wish to be freed of the allegations and return to teaching in Cambodia.

Unfortunately, the victim and her mother was not present as they decided to terminate their participation in the case. Therefore, we were only able to really understand the offender’s perspective.

The process of the trial differed a lot from the Swedish legal process that we know and, in contrast to Sweden, all offenders can appeal to The Supreme Court (the highest level of court) in Cambodia. The Supreme Court does not only handle specific praxis or evidence cases. There were 5 judges, one court clerk, one prosecutor, one child/victim lawyer, and one or several defence lawyers. There was about 15 people on trial, over only 4 hours, that were standing outside, in the doorways or sitting amongst the visitors. There were guards multiple seats behind the offenders, of which some were sleeping. Some offenders/people were on trial, or appealed their convictions, for murder and sex crimes. The hearings were short and we discussed the legal security/certainty (rättssäkerhet) of the proceedings.

We are by no means making any assumptions about the guilt or innocence of the British offender. However, we were quite surprised by the lack of legal security/certainty, e.g. in terms of the translator’s translation of the judges’ and prosecutors’ questions. The english was at times hard to understand and the offender claimed that previous translators had been even worse, at times even drunk. We were lucky to have APLE staff translating the parts in Khmer and the parts in english that we could not understand. The offender also claimed that a 6h trial in The First Instance Court only generated a 2 page court report and that the written report from the initial police interrogation was not translated correctly and excluded major parts of his statement. We also noticed that neither witnesses nor charged offenders swore under oath before witnessing in front of the judges.

An interesting question was raised in regard to cultural differences. The victim was living with her sister in the house of the offender, his wife (the victims aunty) and their own children. One part of the conviction was based on the acts of kissing the child’s cheek and forehead to comfort her when she was sad. Such acts are not considered as appropriate comforting acts by fathers in Cambodia, in contrast to western countries. This observation does not exclude the allegations of sexual touching of private parts, but, solely points out differences in cultural norms.

As a defence, the wife witnessed to her husband’s benefit, by describing the girl victim as a bad daughter, involved in ‘bad’ activities, and being outdoors until midnight. This is a recurring argument that we face in our research about stigmatisation and assigning a complete and legitimate status of being a victim of sexual exploitation and abuse in Cambodia. Daughters are seen as bad or blamed for their own victimisation because they are outdoors at late hours which is far from the western values and perceptions of victimhood.

Next week: last interview!

Week 2: Interviews and Celebrating Khmer New Year

This week we finished our interview guide and consent letter. We started to spread information about our thesis and the APLE organisation on social media and will start a fundraising for the organisation over the coming days.

We interviewed 5 team leaders this week and we have 2 left for next week. It went great, they were very informative and would tell us a lot about their work and experiences! There were some heartbreaking stories and we are amazed about how positive and happy they seem to remain considering their work.

At their office, in between interviews.

The APLE staff were very sweet to invite us to their yearly Khmer New Years celebrations and we were so happy to join! It gave us a chance to get to know the staff outside of the office and they were as warm and inviting, just like they were during the first meeting. It turned out to be a boat get-together with plenty of Cambodian food!

APLE have clear equality principles in all respects and the staff has really inspired us both. One of the employees travels a total of 4 hours every day to get to APLE’s office. There is no shortage of ambition amongst APLE’s employees!

Week 1: Arrived in Cambodia

We arrived in Phnom Penh! It is warm and people are very friendly. We stepped into our pretty decent hotel lobby where we had booked a room for one month and were instantly reminded of why we are here. The sign on the counter says “no sex trafficking”.

After battling our jetlag, we started off with some deep diving into ProQuest to gain a better understanding of Cambodia’s history and its effect on sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA). We also worked our way through prior research to discuss and identify gaps. We noticed that there were plenty of research on the phenomenon SEA along with counter actions and preventions means; yet, very little about victim stigmatisation and the absence of a complete and legitimate status of being a victim. With that, we had found our main focus area and started to put research questions into writing. We realised that both Christie’s “The ideal victim theory” and Goffman’s theory about stigmatisation were great guidelines for our research.

We consider ourselves very lucky to collaborate with the APLE organisation. They gave us a warm welcome as they invited us to a meeting at their office with the team leaders within the organisation. Five hardworking and busy professionals set off an hour of their day to introduce themselves to us and to tell us about their work and ambitions. We are inspired by their drive and commitment to put an end to SEA of children! They also seemed to be very keen to learn from us in exchange which made us feel valued and important too.

Through our own research, we have gained a deeper understanding of the country’s history and context that allows continued exploitation of children, through e.g. prostitution. The Cold War and the US peacekeeping troops, corruption, and poverty are emphasised factors. Later, tourism became a strong contributing factor along with the Internet, which has become an increasingly popular platform for SEA. As a result, the street-based vulnerability has to some extent received less attention, says APLE’s ED. During the meeting with APLE, we also learned that the family and society play a major role in victims’ rehabilitation and reintegration into society as shaming and distancing from abused children is common. Exposure to sexual crimes is “taboo” and victims are facing the risk of being rejected by their families and the society.

Next week, interviews!

Weeks 8 & 9

The final interviews: residential care in Moldova

This project is coming to an end. In order to fully understand Moldova’s elderly care, I visited a residential care home in a village in the estern part of the country. Interviews were carried out with a number of residents, aged between just under 60 and over 90.

Interview with one of the residents of the elderly care home in eastern Moldova.

Residential care is a complicated part of the Moldovan elderly care. Principally, residency is granted only to people who pay for themselves, or who have relatives that pay for them. In all other cases, the process of ageing takes place in each person’s home. There are, however, exceptions. Occasionally, residency will be granted to a person of age whose condition urgently calls for a more permanent form of support than may be offered by home care which, as has been highlighted in previous posts, typically arrives every second day. Such exceptions also require the existance of a free slot, which is becoming rarer as Moldova’s population ages far quicker than the number of residential care places increases.

Residents typically pay 60% of their pension as a fee for a place in a residential care home. Residency includes a bed in a shared room – the room may contain from two to six beds, or even more, and is gender separated. Residency also grants access to a dining room, where cooked meals are offered several times a day. At this particular home, the cook took great pride in serving well-cooked, healthy food which is also offered to staff. I had a lunch together with a group of employees and the food quality was indeed very high. Residents are said to “always put on weight”, according to staff.

Apart from a bed in a shared sleeping room and access to the dining hall, there is a communal area with books, games, a TV-set, as well as some smaller rooms with gym, bathroom and hobby area. When outdoor temperatures permit (which they do about nine months per year in Moldova), residents spend most of their daytime hours outdoors. This center has a garden, some alotment for agriculture, outdoor furniture, a grill, etc.

Interviews and observations brought forward a couple of recurring themes. Firstly, residents consider themselves happy to have arrived at this particular home, which is considered a very good one. They also expressed huge gratitude for not living alone, in their own house, anymore. Being left alone in an otherwise empty house was frequently describes in terms of a disaster, a terrible fate.
Secondly, the power balance between staff and residents appeared quite patronising. Residents were simply told to participate in interviews, although several of them showed hesitation (and I reacted by asking the staff to ask another resident). Staff described residents in terms of “child-like” individuals, persons that need a lot of attention, confirmation, moral support – but with very low own agency. It was clear that being part of the staff means to know what should be done, and being a resident means to accept things as they are, and relax and be peaceful. Staff repeatedly underlined that a large part of their job consists of showing warmth, consideration, emotional proximity, reliability, and build trust. These and similar terms have been repeated also by home care staff that I have interviewed during the previous weeks.

Since my thesis will not focus on residential care, I will not bring a comparison with Swedish residential care into this post. However, several findings during this visit align with what I have found and reflected about in the home care interviews and observation. One thing diverges quite abruptly: the sheer horror with which the residential care interviewees described the lonelyness of an old person living in their own home.

With this post, the academic part of this blogg is coming to an end. A suggestion for future collaboration between students & professors in Moldova and Sweden will be the theme of the last post – stay tuned for that, and please leave a comment below this one.

Glenn Möllergren