Indonesia
Section 6. Discrimination, Societal Abuses, and Trafficking in Persons
Women
Rape and Domestic Violence: The law prohibits rape, domestic abuse, and other forms of violence against women. A 2016 government survey found that one-third of women between the ages of 15 and 64 had experienced violence. Violence against women previously was poorly documented and significantly underreported by the government. Domestic violence was the most common form of violence against women.
The legal definition of rape covers only forced penetration of sexual organs, and filing a case requires corroboration and a witness. Rape is punishable by four to 14 years in prison. While the government imprisoned perpetrators of rape and attempted rape, sentences were often light, and many convicted rapists received the minimum sentence. Marital rape is not a specific criminal offense under the penal code, but is covered under “forced sexual intercourse” in national legislation on domestic violence and can be punished with criminal penalties. Reliable nationwide statistics on the incidence of rape continued to be unavailable, although in 2016 the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment announced the creation of a nationwide data center to monitor cases of sexual violence. In July KOMNAS Perempuan signed an agreement with Telkomtelstra, a telecommunications company, to develop a cloud-based contact center dedicated to providing technological improvements to KOMNAS Perempuan’s telephone hotline system.
The government ran integrated service centers for women and children (P2TPA) in all 34 provinces and approximately 242 districts that provided counseling and support services to victims of violence. The larger provincial service centers provided more comprehensive psychosocial services, while the quality of support at the district-level centers varied. Women living in rural areas or districts where no such center was established had difficulty receiving support services, and some centers were only open for six hours a day and not the required 24 hours. Nationwide, police operated “special crisis rooms” or “women’s desks” where female officers received reports from female and child victims of sexual assault and trafficking and where victims found temporary shelter.
In addition to 32 provincial-level task forces, the government has 191 task forces at the local (district or city) level, which were usually chaired by the local P2TPA or the local social affairs office.
Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C): FGM/C reportedly occurred regularly, and no laws prohibit the practice. A February 2017 UNICEF report, which reflected 2013 government data, estimated that 49 percent of girls age 11 and younger have undergone some form of FGM/C, despite laws prohibiting medical professionals from administering it. The Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection has been vocal in opposing FGM/C and has launched an awareness campaign on the dangers of FGM/C. In 2017 the ministry released a guidebook for religious leaders on the prevention of FGM/C. In May during a conference hosted by the ministry, religious representatives from 34 provinces signed a religious opinion advising the national board of the Indonesia Ulema Council to issue a fatwa downgrading FGM/C from “recommended” to “not required or recommended.”
Sexual Harassment: Article 281 of the criminal code, which prohibits indecent public acts, serves as the basis for criminal complaints stemming from sexual harassment. Violations of this article are punishable by a maximum imprisonment of two years and eight months and a small fine. Civil society and NGOs reported sexual harassment was a problem countrywide.
Coercion in Population Control: There were no reports of coerced abortion or involuntary sterilization.
Discrimination: The law provides for the same legal status and rights for women as for men under family, labor, property, and nationality laws, but it does not grant widows equal inheritance rights. The law states that women’s participation in the development process must not conflict with their role in improving family welfare and educating the younger generation. The law establishes the legal age of marriage as 16 for women and 19 for men, and designates the man as the head of the household. As such, the government taxes married women who work outside the home at a higher rate than working husbands.
Divorce is available to both men and women. Many divorcees received no alimony, since there was no system to enforce such payments. The law requires a divorced woman to wait 40 days before remarrying; a man may remarry immediately.
The National Commission on Violence against Women reported 421 policies that discriminate against women were issued by provincial, district and municipal administrations between 2009 and 2014. These include “morality laws” and antiprostitution regulations, such as those in Bantul and Tangerang, that have been used to detain women walking alone at night. More than 70 local regulations require women to dress conservatively or wear a headscarf. The Ministry of Home Affairs is responsible for “harmonizing” local regulations that are not in line with national legislation and can recommend to the Constitutional Court that the local regulations be overturned. As of August the ministry had not invoked this authority to recommend the overturning of any gender discriminatory local regulations.
Women faced discrimination in the workplace, both in hiring and in gaining fair compensation.
Children
Birth Registration: Citizenship is primarily acquired through one’s parents or through birth in national territory. Without birth registration, families may face difficulties in accessing government-sponsored insurance benefits and enrolling children in schools.
The law prohibits fees for legal identity documents issued by the civil registry. Nevertheless, NGOs reported that in some districts local authorities did not provide free birth certificates.
Education: Although the constitution guarantees free education, most schools were not free, and poverty puts education out of reach for many children. In 2015 the government introduced a nationwide compulsory 12-year school program, but implementation was inconsistent. The Ministry of Education, representing public and private schools, and the Ministry of Religion for Islamic schools and madrassahs, introduced a new system giving students from low-income families a financial grant for their educational needs.
According to the National Statistics Agency, in 2016 approximately one million children ages seven to 15 years did not attend primary or secondary school. An estimated 3.6 million children ages 16 to 18 did not attend school.
Child Abuse: There continued to be reports of child labor and sexual abuse. In February East Java police arrested a junior high school teacher in Jombang (East Java) who allegedly committed sexual abuse against 26 students. The teacher was convicted and received a sentence of 15 years’ imprisonment. The law prohibits child abuse, but NGOs criticized the slow police response in responding to such allegations. The law addresses economic and sexual exploitation of children, as well as adoption, guardianship, and other issues. Some provincial governments did not enforce these provisions.
Early and Forced Marriage: The legal distinction between a woman and a girl was not clear. Marriage law sets the minimum age for marriage at 16 for women (19 for men), but child protection law states that persons younger than 18 are not adults; however, a girl once married has adult legal status. Girls frequently married before they reached age 16, particularly in rural and impoverished areas.
Sexual Exploitation of Children: The penal code forbids consensual sex outside of marriage with girls younger than 15. The law does not address heterosexual acts between women and boys, but it prohibits same-sex acts between adults and minors.
The law prohibits child pornography and prescribes a maximum sentence of 12 years and fine of IDR six billion ($412,000) for producing or trading in child pornography. In March 2017 Jakarta police disrupted a major Facebook group used for sharing child pornography.
According to 2016 data from the Ministry of Social Affairs, there were 56,000 underage sex workers in the country; UNICEF estimated that nationwide 40,000 to 70,000 children were victims of sexual exploitation and that 30 percent of female prostitutes were children.
Displaced Children: According to a Ministry of Social Affairs’ March 2017 report, there were approximately four million neglected children nationwide, including an estimated 16,000 street children. The government continued to fund shelters administered by local NGOs and paid for the education of some street children.
International Child Abductions: The country is not a party to the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. See the Department of State’s Annual Report on International Parental Child Abduction at https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/International-Parental-Child-Abduction/for-providers/legal-reports-and-data.html.
Anti-Semitism
The country’s Jewish population was extremely small. Some fringe media outlets published anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.
Trafficking in Persons
See the Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons Report at www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/.
Persons with Disabilities
The law prohibits discrimination against persons with physical and mental disabilities and mandates accessibility to public facilities for persons with disabilities. The law applies to education, employment, health services, and other state services. The government, however, did not always enforce this provision.
In 2013 the General Elections Commission signed a MOU with several NGOs to increase participation by persons with disabilities in national elections. As a result, 3.6 million voters with disabilities were eligible to vote in the 2014 elections. Regional elections in 2015 and 2017 saw increased accessibility nationwide for voters with disabilities, although improvements were not uniform around the country.
According to NGO data, fewer than 4 percent of children with disabilities had access to education. Children with disabilities were reportedly seven times less likely to attend school than other school-age children. More than 90 percent of blind children reportedly were illiterate.
A comprehensive disability rights law imposes criminal sanctions for violators of the rights of persons with disabilities.
National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities
The government officially promotes racial and ethnic tolerance, but in some areas, religious majorities took discriminatory action against religious minorities, and local authorities made no effective response.
Indigenous People
The government views all citizens as “indigenous” but recognizes the existence of several “isolated communities” and their right to participate fully in political and social life. The Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago estimated there are between 50 and 70 million indigenous persons in the country. These communities include the myriad Dayak tribes of Kalimantan, families living as sea nomads, and the 312 officially recognized indigenous groups in Papua. Indigenous persons, most notably in Papua and West Papua, were subject to discrimination, and there was little improvement in respecting their traditional land rights. Mining and logging activities, many of them illegal, posed significant social, economic, logistical, and legal problems to indigenous communities. The government failed to prevent companies, often in collusion with the local military and police, from encroaching on indigenous peoples’ land. Melanesians in Papua, who were mostly Christians, cited endemic racism and discrimination as drivers of violence and economic inequality in the region.
In 2016 President Jokowi announced a government grant of 32,000 acres of forest concessions to nine local indigenous groups to support local community livelihoods; an additional 20,000 acres were granted in 2017. These “customary forest” or hutan adat land grants were a new land classification specifically designated for indigenous groups. Nevertheless, access to ancestral lands continued to be a major source of tension throughout the country, and large corporations and government regulations continued to displace persons from their ancestral lands. Central and local government officials reportedly extracted kickbacks from mining and plantation companies in exchange for land access at the expense of the local populace.
The government program of transferring migrants from overcrowded islands, such as Java and Madura, diminished greatly in recent years. Communal conflicts often occurred along ethnic lines in areas with sizeable transmigrant populations (see Other Societal Violence and Discrimination below).
Acts of Violence, Discrimination, and Other Abuses Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity
The antidiscrimination law does not apply to LGBTI individuals, and discrimination against LGBTI persons continued. Families often put LGBTI minors into therapy, confined them to their homes, or pressured them to marry.
The pornography law criminalizes the production of media depicting consensual same-sex sexual activity and classifies such activity as deviant. Fines range from IDR 250 million to seven billion ($17,100 to $480,000) and imprisonment from six months to 15 years, with increased penalties of one-third for crimes involving minors.
In addition, local regulations across the country criminalize same-sex sexual activity. For example, the province of South Sumatra and the municipality of Palembang have local ordinances criminalizing same-sex sexual activity and prostitution. Under a local ordinance in Jakarta, security officers consider any transgender person in the streets at night to be a sex worker.
According to media and NGO reports, local authorities sometimes abused transgender persons and forced them to pay bribes following detention. In some cases the government failed to protect LGBTI persons from societal abuse. Police corruption, bias, and violence caused LGBTI persons to avoid interaction with police. Officials often ignored formal complaints by victims and affected persons. In criminal cases with LGBTI victims, police investigated the cases reasonably well, as long as the suspect was not affiliated with police.
Aceh’s sharia criminal code bans consensual same-sex activities and makes them punishable by a maximum 100 lashes, a fine of approximately IDR 551 million ($37,800), or a 100-month prison term. According to Aceh’s sharia agency chief, at least four witnesses must observe individuals engaging in consensual same-sex activities for them to be charged. On January 28, police raided several beauty salons in Aceh and detained as many as a dozen transgender employees over claims they teased a group of boys. Police accused the employees of violating the province’s religious law, then forced some of them to cut their long hair and wear “male” clothing and speak in “masculine” voices while in custody for several days. Police maintained they acted to protect the transgender persons from threats from certain “Muslim hardliners.”
In May 2017 two gay men in Aceh who reportedly identify as Muslims were convicted of violating Aceh’s criminal code. The two men were each publicly caned with 83 lashes. The men were not allowed to speak with lawyers after they were detained by sharia police, according to human rights organizations. This was the first instance in which individuals were charged and punished for consensual same-sex activity, which is not illegal under national law (see section 1.d. for more information on sharia in Aceh).
Transgender persons faced discrimination in employment and in obtaining public services and health care. NGOs documented instances of government officials not issuing identity cards to transgender persons. The law only allows transgender individuals officially to change their gender after the completion of sex reassignment surgery. Some observers claimed the process was cumbersome and degrading because it requires a court order declaring that the surgery is complete and is permitted only under certain undefined special circumstances.
LGBTI NGOs operated openly but frequently held low-key public events because the licenses or permits required for holding registered events were difficult to obtain.
HIV and AIDS Social Stigma
Stigmatization and discrimination against persons with HIV/AIDS were pervasive. The government encouraged tolerance, took steps to prevent new infections, and provided free antiretroviral drugs, although with numerous administrative barriers. The government’s position of tolerance was adhered to inconsistently at all levels of society. For example, prevention efforts were often muted for fear of antagonizing religious conservatives. Diagnostic, medical, or other fees and expenses that put the cost of free antiretroviral drugs beyond the reach of many compounded barriers to accessing these drugs. Persons with HIV/AIDS reportedly continued to face employment discrimination.
According to a Human Rights Watch report released in June, highly publicized police raids targeting gay men and anti-LGBTI rhetoric by officials and other influential figures since early 2016 have caused significant disruption to HIV awareness and testing programs.
Other Societal Violence or Discrimination
Minority religious groups were victims of societal discrimination that occasionally included violence. Affected groups included Ahmadis, Shias, and other non-Sunni Muslims. In areas where they constituted a minority, Sunni Muslims and Christians were also victims of societal discrimination.
Ethnic and religious tensions sometimes contributed to localized violence, and tensions between local residents and migrant workers occasionally led to violence, including in Papua and West Papua.