Ismira Lutfia – Official discrimination against women is on the rise, particularly at the local government level, according to a survey released by the National Commission on Violence Against Women.

Komnas Perempuan, as the rights body is known, found 207 local government policies that disadvantaged women in 2011, mostly in the name of religion and morality. This figure is up from 154 in 2009.

Some policies were overtly discriminative, while others constituted indirect discrimination by tending to disproportionately disadvantage women compared to men, the group said.

"As many as 82 of the 207 regional policies were directly discriminative against women," a Komnas Perempuan member, Andy Yentriyani, said during a national consultation on enforcing women's constitutional rights on Monday.

Andy said 55 of the objectionable policies criminalized women through provisions ostensibly designed to deal with prostitution, pornography and "immoral" meetings between unmarried persons of the opposite sex.

There were also 23 policies that infringed on women's rights to self-expression by dictating modes of dress.

On the brighter side, Andy pointed to 44 government regulations that provided assistance to female victims of violence, eight against human trafficking and six relating to women's health and education.

The head of the National Resilience Institute (Lemhannas), a security think tank, Budi Susilo Supandji, said that discrimination in any form undermined national cohesion.

"A current challenge to national security is the problem with social justice," he said. "And if it can't be resolved then it will become a threat."