Cambodia – The Kreung Tribe and their The Love Huts

What happens when you give a teenage girl her own house and allow her to have as many boys as she likes come and stay the night with her?

It may sound like a recipe for broken hearts and unplanned pregnancies, but the Kreung tribe of remote North Eastern Cambodia believe this is the best way for their daughters to find true love. When girls there reach their mid teens their parents build them their own tiny “love huts” and encourage them to have different boys spend the night with them until they find one they want to marry.

Fiona MacGregor and Louis Quail travelled into the jungle to meet the Kreung girls in their love huts and find out whether having such sexual independence really is the secret to forming long lasting loving relationships. What they discovered was a surprisingly romantic society where teenage girls are confident in dealing with boys and have a powerful sense of what they are looking for in a relationship. Divorce there is extremely rare and rape is virtually unheard of. At a time when young women In The west face conflicting ideas from the media and exponents of “traditional” values about appropriate sexual behaviour, the Kreung offer a valuable insight into what happens when girls are trusted to run their own love lives free from adult interference.

But as it has more contact with the outside world, this remarkable culture is under threat from the increasing influence of Western society through television and even internet porn. Could the secrets of the Love Huts soon be lost forever…?