Indonesian Parliament Passes Landmark Bill Tackling Sexual Violence

Indonesia’s fight against sexual violence welcomed a long-waited new chapter this week when its Parliament passed a landmark bill aimed at providing legal framework for victims to seek justice. The bill was backed by a majority of lawmakers at the plenary session on April 12, overcoming strong opposition from conservative groups in the world’s biggest Muslim-majority country.

“We hope that the implementation of this law will confront and resolve cases of sexual violence, [and protect] women and children in Indonesia,” Puan Maharani, speaker of Indonesia’s House of Representatives (DPR), told Parliament during Tuesday’s session.

The new law comes a decade after the legislation was first proposed by Komnas Perempuan (the national commission on violence against women) in 2012 but had languished for years amid arguments it was at odds with religious and cultural values in Indonesia. It gained prominence in 2016 when activists called for the legislation to be fast-tracked following the shocking gang-rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl by more than a dozen men in 2012.

The latest draft won majority support when provisions on rape and coerced abortions were removed, as lawmakers sought to avoid overlaps with proposals to amend the Criminal Code.

Reported cases of rape and other violent assaults against girls and women rose 66% to over 431,000 in 2019, according to data compiled by Komnas Perempuan. The commission estimates that the majority of cases have gone unreported because victims are often scared or discouraged from seeking justice.

The law passed following the latest high-profile sexual violence case in Indonesia, involving an Islamic boarding school principal named Herry Wirawan who raped at least 13 students over five years and impregnated some of them. The case, wherein victims were as young as 11 years old and had endured the abuse for years, had sparked outrage across the country. An Indonesian high court last week sentenced Wirawan to death.

The new law has provisions for the protection and recovery of the victims and recognizes nine forms of sexual violence: physical and nonphysical sexual harassment, sexual torture, forced contraception, forced sterilization, forced marriage, sexual slavery, sexual exploitation, and cyber sexual harassment. It includes prison terms of up to 15 years, a fine of 1 billion rupiah ($69,600) for sexual exploitation, and four years and a 200 million rupiah ($13,920) fine for electronic-based sexual violence. The legislation also acknowledges sexual violence as a punishable criminal act and recognizes that men and children can be victims of sexual violence. The latter recognition addresses a legal loophole in Indonesia’s Criminal Code (a legacy of the Dutch colonization) that only recognizes rape and lewd crimes committed by men against women.

The bill’s advocates, having been part of the long and arduous journey to this moment, rejoiced and welcomed the law’s passing.

Tunggal Pawestri, a gender rights activist and executive director of Hivos Foundation, took her time to process the landmark development.

“I still cannot believe it; I cried a bit. This is the result of all our hard work, and finally we succeeded,” Pawestri told the FBomb.

Many Indonesians took to social media to celebrate the law’s passing, reflecting part of the online advocacy that has risen in support of the bill in recent years.

“Never in my life I thought I’d be crying when a law got passed. Welcome UU TPKS, and hats off to all the people who has been fighting for this!” user @voxtira tweeted, referring to the Indonesian acronym for the legislation.

Lawmakers had sped up deliberations following an appeal in January by President Joko Widodo.

“The protection of sexual violence victims should be our common concern which should be urgently addressed,” Widodo said.

Siti Mazuma, director of the women’s legal aid foundation LBH Apik, noted there’s plenty of work to do before implementing the law.

“In the future, it’s all about how we watch over this [new law] so that the implementation is in line with what we’d hoped for, with what has been written, because we have a lot of work to do,” Mazuma told the FBomb. “The legal system, the law enforcement officers, are all the mechanisms ready with this extremely good, new law?”

In Indonesia, prosecuting sexual crimes has been complicated by the absence of a dedicated legal framework, while a general belief lingered in society that this type of abuse is a private matter, not a legal one. Victims are reluctant to speak up out of fear of being shamed during questioning and community pressure to remain silent.

Pawestri stressed that the general public must be aware of the contents of the law, which she said might require a long time.

“That’s our homework — to make sure the public knows the content of the legislation and what rights they [now have],” Pawestri said.