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In my play Eyes of the Heart, the main character, Thida, is experiencing psychosomatic blindness following the murder of her daughter during the Khmer Rouge’s brutal reign in Cambodia. While her brainwaves indicate she can see, her eyes will not process the horrors before them.
Thida is fictional; her experience is not. She represents tens of thousands of survivors of Cambodia’s gender-based atrocities, which subjected women and girls to sexual violence, torture, forced marriage and death.
International law has failed entire generations of women.
At mass atrocities across the last half century, their suffering has been documented, condemned and inadequately punished. Today, that failure continues in Afghan classrooms, in Cambodian prisons, in Sudan, where women have endured catastrophic sexual violence, displacement and hunger, and in Iran, where women who have demanded basic rights have faced imprisonment, violence and death.
Meanwhile, governments continue to negotiate over security, weapons, territory and power.
The question is whether women’s freedom and safety will be treated as central to those negotiations — or once again as something the world can address later.
There is now an extraordinary opportunity to confront some of these failures. The United Nations has begun the formal process toward negotiating a first international convention specifically devoted to preventing and punishing crimes against humanity. Among the issues under consideration is how international law recognizes gender-based atrocities, including systematic forms of oppression sometimes described as gender apartheid.
The women who have spent years fighting for stronger protections know better than to confuse recognition with remedy. They understand the distance between creating law and enforcing it.
Cambodian lawyer Theary Seng, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge who has been imprisoned after speaking out against her country’s government, knows that distance. Cambodia is not a state operating beyond the international system. It belongs to major international institutions and participates in human-rights mechanisms.
And yet repression continues.
International law has also accomplished important things. The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women was a landmark. United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 formally recognized the particular ways conflict affects women. The Rome Statute recognized rape and sexual slavery as crimes against humanity.
These were hard-won achievements.
But the central problem remains: creating a legal commitment is not the same as creating accountability.
Women know the difference.
Afghanistan offers one of the starkest contemporary examples. Since returning to power, the Taliban has systematically restricted the education, employment and public lives of women and girls. Girls remain barred from secondary education. Women face severe restrictions on university study, work and participation in public life, and restrictions on Afghan female United Nations personnel have further impeded humanitarian operations.
Women and girls around the world must be worth fighting for. Their lives are more valuable than oil, more real than the illusion of peace.
The Beauty Inside (New Georges, co-produced with InterAct Theatre Co., Philadelphia, PA)
I am a playwright, not a lawyer.
Theatre does something that law, by design, cannot. Law abstracts; it must generalize and condense human experiences in order to apply them.
Art refuses to.
It sits an audience in a room and says:
This is a human being.
This happened.
You know it now.
What will you do?
That question has followed me through much of my work, from Cambodia and the legacy of genocide to women confronting political violence and repression.
It remains at the center of the work I am writing now.
As lawmakers, advocates and international institutions grapple with a gender-equality gap that spans generations and continents, artists have a different responsibility: to keep making individual human beings visible.
To tell the stories of women still waiting for the world to see them.
And to refuse to let the distance between a promise of justice and the lived reality of women disappear from view.
Published Sep. 30, 2026
A playwright on what happens when the law promises protection but women are still left waiting for justice
For much of my life as a playwright, I have written about people caught at the point where law, power and human experience collide.
I have written about survivors of the Khmer Rouge, about genocide and the effort to create a legal language for it, about political repression and about women whose bodies and freedoms become battlegrounds. Again and again, I return to the same question: What happens when systems created to protect human beings fail the people who most need their protection?
I am not an international lawyer. I am a playwright. But perhaps that is precisely why I keep returning to this question.