Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the non-technical barriers to implement the Indonesian Law on Sexual Violence Crimes of 2022, which is lauded as a progressive anti-gender-based violence legislation that expands the definition of sexual violence to include perpetrator's intention to violate the victim's dignity.
Paper long abstract
After decades of advocacy, Indonesia ratified the Law on Sexual Violence Crimes in 2022, during heightened online conversations about sexual violence against girls cases. The criminal legislation has been lauded as exceptionally comprehensive; a significant progress in addressing gender-based violence. Nonetheless, the anti-sexual violence law is said to be challenging to implement in the specific socio-cultural and historical context of Indonesia. This paper employs poststructural analysis on the Law on Sexual Violence Crimes text and interview transcripts of activists involved in its development to examine non-technical barriers of implementing the legislation.
Given the extensive criminal justice procedures written in the Law of Sexual Violence Crimes, it seems to heavily problematise the lack of evidence to prove that a sexual violence really happens, or that the incident is truly a sexual violence. The law expands representations of sexual violence, which is not only sex without consent or with unequal power relations, but also sexuality-oriented activities with intentions to degrade the victim’s dignity. Consequently, the law introduces new ways of proving sexual violence, or what counts as evidence.
Nonetheless, a policy to ‘solve’ barriers in judicial proceedings may inadvertently create other kinds of ‘problem’. In the case of the Law on Sexual Violence Crimes, reporting or exposing the sexual violence incident could be another violation of dignity. People might think that if nobody reports, then the sexual violence can be considered to not have happened, and thus, the victims’ dignity remains ‘unviolated’. How this way of thinking becomes conceivable will be discussed.
New and emerging directions for gender based violence: Methods, findings and applications