Productive Polarisation in the Indonesian Debate on Sexual Violence Legislation

The next speaker in this AoIR 2024 conference session is my QUT colleague Alia Azmi, whose focus is on the campaign to address sexual violence in Indonesia. For various sociocultural reasons, Indonesia did not engage much with the global #metoo movement; the defamation laws and victim blaming practices have generally deterred victim-survivors to speak out against sexual violence. Indonesia also did not have any strong laws against sexual violence.

A new bill addressing sexual violence was proposed in 2016, and remained stuck in parliamentary processes for several years; clauses about inability to give consent in particular were interpreted by conservative Muslim groups as legalising extramarital sexual relations. A revised draft of the bill was finally passed in 2022.

Alia’s work studies the debate about this bill on Twitter over the course of these years. While activity was generally low throughout these years, this was interrupted by several major peaks – in 2019, conservative groups drew attention against to the bill by expressing their opposition; this also produced a backlash, however, as the lack of action on passing the bill generated notable public protests in favour of it as well. In November 2021, a further spike resulted from an acknowledgment of cases of sexual violence at university campuses by the Minister of Education.

Such debates on Twitter show clear signs of interactional polarisation. Opposition to the bill by conservative groups actively generated increased discussions about sexual violence in Indonesia, though, and led activists to better explain the idea of sexual violence and thereby win further public support; this is different from the #metoo approach centred on sharing personal experiences, and instead focusses much more on finding appropriate and societally acceptable definitions of sexual violence.