Violence against women reform in post-authoritarian Indonesia: Between women's rights and Islamic morality

This paper examines how Indonesian women have successfully achieved two watershed VAW reforms since the collapse of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998: 1) the passage of the Domestic Violence Law in 2004; and 2) the passage of the Sexual Violence Law in 2022. It compares factors shaping the success of each VAW reform attempt and explains the variations in the pace and outcome of these reforms. Combining feminist institutionalist (FI) theory and Htun and Weldon’s typology of gender equality policies, I underscore that VAW, as a gender issue in Indonesia, should be understood within the continuum of status politics and doctrinal politics. This article demonstrates that the success of each reform was contingent on how reform advocates negotiated between a women’s rights agenda on the one hand, and an Islamic morality agenda on the other, in a male-dominated political terrain. I identify multiple strategies deployed by women’s civil society groups, including vernacularizing women’s rights discourses, building coalitions with critical actors, capitalizing on electoral politics, and deploying religious frames. I also highlight continuity and change in the strategies deployed by women’s groups to secure these two VAW reforms, shedding light on why some strategies were useful during the first reform attempt but subsequently lost their efficacy. The deployment of these strategies was shaped by multiple intersecting factors that both enable and constrain VAW reform, including the gendered dynamics of democratisation, the influence of an international women’s rights agenda, and the power of informal rules such as patriarchal religious doctrines.