A study conducted by the Women’s Media Centre of Cambodia found that the Cambodian media consistently degrade women through stereotypes. Researchers found that women are the focus of only seven percent of the stories in newspapers, but are featured in 20 percent of the photographs and 92 percent of the cartoons and drawings. Eighty percent of the drawings were deemed “obscene,” while more than 50 percent of the cartoons portrayed women as sex objects.
The study also reported that 63 percent of the scenes in Cambodian entertainment portray women in traditional roles, such as wife, mother, lover or daughter.
Tive Sarayeth of the Women’s Media Centre said, according to the media “it looks like the Cambodia woman is concerned mainly with one thing: to find a man and keep him through her feminine charms so she can dedicate herself to suffering for her husband and children for the rest of her life …. It would appear that the media threatens women who do not behave in the way tradition dictates.”
