Gender, faith, and sexual violence in Indonesia

This chapter discusses the trajectory of Indonesia’s Muslim women’s movement in the past decade. It argues that rising religious piety at an individual level has a significant influence on public discourse on women’s rights, justice, and equality. Several key developments in the area of lawmaking pertaining to women’s status are considered, with particular focus on the debate around the deliberation of the Anti-Sexual Violence Bill. This chapter demonstrates that Islamists persistently deploy Islam as a tool in the formulation of specific laws regulating women’s rights, despite the fact that Indonesian Islamic political parties have failed to secure significant political representation. This provides a warning that, while many Indonesian Muslims continue to uphold the idea that religious values are consistent with democratic values such as equality and tolerance, this is not the case when it comes to women’s rights and equality.