How morality-obsessed Indonesia fails its children
A tough anti-rape law, seen as cruel and inhumane by human rights activists, is now in place. Yet, Indonesia is still failing its children.
The revised Child Protection Law, introduced in 2016, was a warning to potential offenders that the punishment for child rape would be unforgiving: forced chemical castration. It was initiated by President Joko Widodo in response to national outrage over the gang rape and killing of a 14-year-old girl in Bengkulu.
Yet, barely two years later, in an ironic and tragic twist, the very same law was used to punish a child for simply being a victim to the failures of the state and society to protect her. A 15-year-old girl in Batanghari, Jambi, was sentenced to six months in jail for aborting her eight-month-old foetus under Article 77 of the Law.
The girl, who was known to be quiet and rarely left her house, lived with her 18-yearold brother and 38-year-old mother. Her brother allegedly raped her repeatedly. Her mother, who was abandoned by her father, helped her terminate the pregnancy.
Abortion is illegal in Indonesia, except for health reasons or for rape victims. The Jambi girl was still charged with a crime, however, as abortion is legal only if it is done within the first 40 days of pregnancy and carried out by medical professionals.
That being said, her being sent to jail still reeks of injustice. She’s only 15. She was carrying her brother’s baby. And her mother might have encouraged her to abort the baby for fear of being shamed by neighbours.
Her case sums up how the new law has miserably failed to serve its purpose. It reflects everything that is wrong with how
the country deals with sexual abuse – that rape is the by-product of a permissive, immoral society and that stricter laws or harsher punishments would be the silver bullet to end it.
The Jambi family’s tragedy barely made headlines in national media. Local media reported extensively on the case, but it was largely framed as an incest and murder story
in which the girl was both victim and perpetrator. It implied that the sexual relationship between the brother and sister was consensual.
The local press ignored their own reporting of the brother’s admission that he had threatened to physically harm his sister if she refused to have sex with him, and that prosecutors had charged him with statutory rape. But perhaps the media is not entirely at fault, for it is only reflecting what the public wants to see. The grim fact is that victim blaming remains largely the norm in Indonesia, with many religious leaders and public officials pointing their fingers to female victims’ attire in cases of sexual violence.
Then there is the report of a 16-year-old student in Bogor, West Java, who struggled with depression and then died after having sexual intercourse with her boyfriend in an empty house. She was actually gang-raped by eight people, including her boyfriend. The police have arrested the perpetrators, which include underage boys.
Unlike the 2016 Bengkulu rape case, neither the Jambi or Bogor case triggered public outrage, possibly because of a belief that the victims were somehow partly to blame for what happened to them.
Was it rape? Was it consensual? Why did she go with her boyfriend to an empty house?
From the moral standpoint, everyone involved seems complicit, even the victim. A strict law on sexual abuse and sexual assault is certainly needed to combat sexual violence. But it takes more than a piece of legislation to win the fight.
The girl in Jambi was not only a victim of her brother’s sexual aggression; she was also a victim of rape culture and of society’s blind obsession with morality, which led to a public failure to differentiate between a victim of sexual abuse and her abuser.
As long as we refuse to confront these problems, we will continue to fail our children – no matter how merciless our anti-rape law.