Jakarta – The National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) says there is an urgent need to pass a sexual violence bill into law as many crimes cannot be processed due to loopholes in existing laws.
Komnas Perempuan chairman Azriana said police investigators, for instance, often could not find relevant articles in the Criminal Code (KUHP) to use to develop their investigations.
She said the idea to create a special law regulating sex violence was based on results of monitoring that found forms of sexual violence now had wide variations. At the same time, the commissioner said, current laws regulated the protection of sex violence victims in a limited way, particularly if the victims were adult women.
"The KUHP only regulates the definition of rape, molestation and sexual harassment with very narrow concepts. Other laws, such as the 2004 Domestic Violence Eradication Law, the 2002 Child Protection Law and the 2007 Anti-Human Trafficking Law also have the same issue," Azriana said in a statement on Thursday, as quoted by kompas.com.
She added that based on results of Komnas Perempuan's monitoring since 1998, the number of sex violence cases in Indonesia had continued to increase. A quarter of the total 321,000 cases of violence against women documented in 2015 were sexual in nature, she said.
Azriana said sexual violence against adult women resulted in impacts equally as severe as in cases involving children. Rape, for instance, could impact victims throughout their lives, reducing their quality of life, she said.
She said the drafting of the sexual violence eradication bill had begun in 2012, starting with an academic paper. The draft bill was created in 2014. Komnas Perempuan and several care providers as its partners were now finalizing the bill, Azriana said.
"The draft, which has been handed over to President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo, is the latest revision of the sexual violence eradication bill as of May 19. A similar draft has also been handed over to the House of Representatives as the initiator of the bill," said Azriana. (ebf)