A Girl's Gang Rape and Murder Sparked Calls for Change; Things Only Got Worse
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14 December 2021 19:10 WIB
BY: GEMMA HOLLIANI CAHYA, DAVID PIERSON
TEMPO.CO, Bengkulu - She keeps a pile of her daughter’s belongings in a corner of her bedroom: report cards, notebooks wrapped with pages torn from old calendars, a favorite Hello Kitty dress.
More than five years after her child was gang raped and murdered in one of the most gruesome cases of sexual violence in Indonesia, the mother tries to tame her grief by pretending Yuyun is still near.
She Photoshops her into family portraits taken long after her death. She dresses her new toddler in her slain daughter’s hand-me-downs. Sometimes, she even makes the mistake of calling the little one Yuyun.
“I want her to know I still think of her,” said the mother, Yana, a 38-year-old farmworker who must live in hiding because of threats made against her by relatives of the attackers. “My heart is broken. She was not only my daughter, she was my friend.”
Yuyun was a day away from turning 14 when she was assaulted on her walk home from school. Her body was discovered two days later at the bottom of a cliff covered by leaves, her hands bound behind her back. A post-mortem found she had died from multiple blows to the head before she was raped.
BORN INTO DANGER
Born Into Danger
This is a story about discrimination and human rights abuses faced by women in Indonesia.
News of her murder ignited outrage, inspiring protests, candlelight vigils and calls to pass laws to protect women and children in a country where sexual violence regularly goes unpunished. President Joko Widodo demanded Yuyun’s killers face the death penalty.
But since then, this nation of 17,000 islands has only grown more dangerous for women and girls — and the prospect of passing laws to protect them ever more frustrating. Yuyun’s death, once seen as a turning point in a patriarchal society, now stands as a disturbing symbol of how little progress has been made in the fight for gender equality.
“Five years after what happened to Yuyun, we are still at the same place,” said Veni Siregar, a longtime advocate for female abuse victims. “It feels like she’s been forgotten.”
Reported cases of rape and other violent assaults against girls and women have soared since Yuyun’s slaying in 2016, rising by 66% to 430,000 in 2019, according to data compiled by Indonesia’s National Commission for Violence against Women. The number dipped to 300,000 in 2020 because of COVID-19 lockdowns, but still remained 15% above 2016 levels. The commission estimates that only 30% of the incidents are reported as victims are often scared or discouraged from going to the police.
Veni blamed the crisis on the country’s weak laws, which have emboldened abusive men to act with impunity and discouraged police from seriously investigating assaults. “Many cases are not processed properly,” she said. “When an assault takes place between two adults, authorities usually conclude that it was not an assault but an act of consensual sex.
“The situation is even worse when it’s a case of domestic violence because they’ll mostly just ask the couples to reconcile.”
The problem is particularly acute in schools. Education Minister Nadiem Makarim said in November universities were facing a “pandemic” of sexual violence, citing a survey last year that found 77% of campus educators knew of an assault and 63% of them failed to report it.
Women’s rights activists say those troubling and persistent figures could have been averted if lawmakers passed a law called the Elimination of Sexual Violence Bill, which proposed sweeping changes to policing assault and targeting the culture of misogyny complicit in Yuyun’s death.
Backers of the bill, which was introduced the same year Yuyun was killed, wanted to include a spectrum of sexual offenses such as sexual harassment, sexual torture, forced pregnancy and forced prostitution. The current criminal code only recognizes sexual violence as molestation, adultery and rape, which is defined narrowly as forced penetration of a penis into a vagina.
Just as importantly, activists say, the law would have provided legal and medical support for victims. Existing laws make it difficult for victims to expose their abusers. In one high-profile case, a school bookkeeper and mother of three named Baiq Nuril was sentenced to six months in jail in 2018 for defamation after she recorded her principal making lewd advances toward her. It took a presidential pardon to prevent her from going to prison.
The uneven treatment of women is not unexpected in a country where power is kept mostly in the hands of men. According to the World Bank, only one-fifth of senior and middle management jobs are filled by women, mirroring the share of female lawmakers in parliament. That inequality has hardened traditional gender roles at a time when conservative Islam has become a greater force in Indonesian life. Sex has grown more taboo and devoid of female perspective.
The burden on women not to seek justice — and instead to comply with the wishes of men and the constrictions of religion — is startling. Earlier this year, Indonesia’s top legal official, Mahfud MD, suggested rape victims and their families might be better off if they adhered to old tribal rules requiring them to marry their rapists “so that the rape victim isn’t ashamed in front of the whole village.”
