The article aims to contribute to feminist critiques of the treatment of gendered harm in international law, specifically in relation to socio-economic forms of violence. It focuses on deprivations of subsistence needs, in the form of forced displacement and attacks on homes, livelihoods and basic resources, as one particular type of gendered harm that has remained marginalized in international law. Whilst existing feminist research provides some significant insights into the gendered nature of socio-economic forms of violence, there has yet to be systematic analysis and conceptualizations of such harm. The article argues that the concept of subsistence harms, in foregrounding the interrelated physical, mental and social harms of deprivations of subsistence needs, provides a way both of contesting current concepts and framings of violence and of exploring gendered experiences of forced displacement and attacks on homes, livelihoods and basic resources. Whilst the concept only focuses on one particular type of harm, it could contribute to feminist discourse on gendered harm in providing a framework and language with which to analyse gendered experiences of these harms and therefore providing one way of taking the current debate forward.
Forty years after the beginning of the Khmer Rouge regime, the recent Trial Chamber judgment in case 002/01 before Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) has provided legal recognition of the devastating violence of the forced population movements. However, despite the undoubted significance of the judgment, it represents a missed opportunity to more fully reflect issues of gender. The article argues that in order to capture the plurality of gendered experiences it is necessary to foreground a social understanding of harm. Drawing on civil party oral testimony, the article begins to surface gendered experiences of the social harms of familial separation and starvation of family members, harms that have often remained silenced in international criminal law. In doing so it seeks to contribute to emerging feminist discourse on broader gendered harms and illustrates the need for further scrutiny of the approach of the ECCC.
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