By IINA
Jakarta : Violence against women in Indonesia has steadily increased after nearly a decade of political reform, the Jakarta Post quoted the National Commission for Women’s Protection as saying here yesterday. State institutions both in central and regional governments were among the main perpetrators through their discriminatory regulations, the report said.
Violence has increased despite the fact that the government has enacted 10 laws and signed three regional treaties to eliminate all forms of violence against women.
In a report on the state of women’s protection issued in conjunction with the International Women’s Day, the commission highlighted 27 regional bylaws which it says discriminate against women, either through the criminalization of women or seeking to control women’s bodies. “For example, there’s a regulation that forbids women from going out at night or others that determine how women should dress,” Xinhua reported quoting commissioner Arimbi Heroepoetri as saying. She said that under these regulations women could easily be labeled, and punished, as “immoral” women simply because they went home late at night or wore tight clothes.
Tangerang municipality near Jakarta last year issued an ordinance banning women from going outside of their homes after 10 p.m. According to Arimbi, there has been a significant increase in the number of cases of domestic violence reported thanks to the law, which categorizes all acts of violence against women as criminal. She said the sharpest increase in the number of reported cases of domestic violence occurred in 2005, with 16,615 reported cases, or almost four times the 4,310 cases reported in 2004.