TEMPO.CO, Aceh - It’s just another day in Banda Aceh, the capital city of Indonesia’s only Sharia-regulated province and one of its poorest.
Officials—mostly men—from the Sharia police are gathered at Taman Sari, a popular public park at the heart of the city. Among the scant crowd is a group of college girls and photojournalists jostling to get the perfect shot. In the middle of the park’s arena, a woman cloaked in a white jilbab and her face covered with a mask is seated on her knees on a carpet. She’s accused of a “crime”; meeting a man who is not her husband.
As an officer reads out the crime, another woman, dressed head-to-toe in a brown jilbab, gets ready with a cane next to her.
On cue, the woman in brown delivers swift blows on the accused’s back 22 times. Once it’s over, the accused gets up and leaves. Three more floggings of men by men for other crimes follow.
Public floggings are business as usual in Aceh, a uniquely conservative province in a country that has the world’s largest Muslim population. Floggings are highly publicized and usually well attended. What’s uncommon, though, is flogging delivered by a woman, a contract employee of the Sharia police.
In 2020, just before the pandemic gripped the world, Aceh’s Sharia police officially unveiled an all-women flogging squad—a first in the country where the punishment has drawn international attention, and criticism, for years. VICE World News attended the first flogging of 2022 by a woman flogger, in November, and met two women floggers to understand their role in Sharia policing and society.
Once in the grips of decades-long violent independence struggle from the central government, Aceh’s Sharia law was formalized in 2003 when Jakarta granted special authorization. The special-autonomous status allows Aceh to pass its own laws and, over time, hundreds of Sharia-based ordinances have come to dominate public-life-from clothing restrictions, to banning women to sit astride motorcycles, to an intermingling of opposite sexes, playing live music, and drinking. One study found 442 local Sharia regulations enacted between 1999 and 2012.
The idea of inducting a woman flogger, according to Muhammad Rizal, the head of Aceh’s Sharia police, is to tackle the problem of rising crime among women. A female flogger is better placed to punish a woman because a male flogger’s delivery is “too harsh,” he added.
“The purpose of flogging is not to torture the person, but to make them feel guilty,” Rizal told VICE World News. “That’s why, if the perpetrator is a woman, then the flogger should be a woman too.”
The Sharia police go to great lengths to conceal the identities of women floggers from the public. Rizal said that is so that they don’t face retaliation or other forms of revenge later on. “I myself don’t know the real identities of the women floggers,” he said.
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THE optics of inducting women floggers is a matter of pride for the Sharia police in a country where restrictions on women often make it to international headlines. In the past, they’ve taken international media on patrols to demonstrate how they maintain strict moral conduct on the streets, especially for women.
In official data shared by Sharia police with VICE World News, crimes against morality, such as unmarried men and women caught together, have seen a steep drop in 2021 as compared to 2018. For instance, khalwat, or when an unmarried man and woman are in a secluded place together, was reported 90 times in 2018. In 2021, that number was down to 8. The Sharia police attribute this to flogging. Activists disagree.
“It’s performative—the floggings in general and the induction of women floggers,” M. Adli Abdullah, an Acehnese historian, and expert on the province’s Islamic law, told VICE World News. “Floggings are a part of the image building of the Sharia law by the Aceh police. I don’t believe it’s reducing any kind of crime.”
Banda Aceh, the province's capital and largest city, which has a population of 252,899, has four women floggers. There are eight women floggers across the province. Roslina A Djalil, the head of Sharia law enforcement who inducts women floggers, told VICE World News that they are still an unusual sight.
VICE World News spoke to two women floggers on the condition of anonymity. They are identified with pseudonyms. They came in their flogging gear and revealed little about their personal lives out of concern for being identified.
Mariam, Aceh’s first woman flogger, wanted to become a lawyer but joined the Sharia police instead in 2006 and then was appointed by the prosecutor to become a woman flogger in 2018. “I never thought of becoming a flogger but when this regulation was made, I was ready for it,” the mother of four children told VICE World News.
The act of flogging doesn’t faze her either. “It’s an order from the government of Aceh,” she said. “Since I’m human, I used to shake out nervousness at first. But honestly, there’s no fear because I consider it a duty to God.”
She is aware that she holds a special position in a male-dominated field, but doesn’t know whether it’ll inspire other women to follow suit. “Maybe the bigger lesson for them is to watch the flogging and not do anything that’s forbidden,” she said.
Reha, another flogger who also joined in 2018, said that women floggers have “really helped” maintain law and order. “Back then, there were many women perpetrators [of Sharia crimes],” she said. “So women floggers had to be inducted to handle [this crime].”
Religion is a part of life, even in policing. But Djalil said that inducting floggers requires rationale and training. “Every aspect of flogging is regulated by the procedural law: How to whip, the length of the cane, the diameter, everything,” she said. Djalil, who’s been in the Sharia law service for 13 years, held out a cane at arm’s length to demonstrate, saying the more the arm is pulled back, the stronger the lash is. The cane must not land above or below the upper back too.
“The intensity of the lashes should be in accordance with the Qanun (Sharia law),” she said. ”It shouldn’t be so weak that people who are watching aren’t satisfied, or think the punishment isn’t painful enough.”
An overarching message by the Sharia police and floggers is the importance of stoicism towards the accused.
“I’ve trained some women who can hit the accused, but they felt sorry for them too,” said Djalil. “[The biggest quality I look for] is their ability to not be empathetic.” Mariam said that she once flogged someone she knew but didn’t feel any empathy because that’s what the job demands.
Mistakes are rarely tolerated and can result in expulsion from the post.
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