“Even if she didn’t want to have sex, she couldn’t have gone anywhere.”
When we meet on a quiet street away from Phnom Penh’s daytime bustle, Samnang is showing little sign of the aftereffects of an evening spent carousing at a local bar. Bright-eyed and lively, he chats eagerly about his friends’ weekend plans.
“We go dancing and looking for girls,” he says. “It’s great. I like this kind of life. I don’t ever want to get old.”
At 24, Samnang looks like many Cambodian men his age, dressed in a fitted plaid shirt and skinny jeans. Samnang is not his real name; he’s only agreed to let me record our conversation if I don’t identify him. He’s not shy, though, when asked about the first time he and his friends forced a woman to have sex.
For PRI's The World, a look at Cambodia's alarming problem of gang rape.