LET'S TALK ABOUT (NON-CONSENSUAL) SEX: THE STRUGGLE AGAINST RAPE IN INDONESIA

Abstract

This thesis examines the increasing politicisation of the struggle against rape in Indonesia across three distinct episodes: i) the late New Order period (1990-1997); ii) the rapes of May 1998 and their aftermath (1998-c.2008); and iii) the push for legal reforms around sexual violence (2010-2020). I analyse snapshots of key events and developments in each episode to excavate, trace, and pin down the deeply embedded mechanisms and forces that shaped and sustained the prevalence of rape since the 1990s. Drawing upon the theory of “sexual scripts” by Gagnon and Simon (1973), I argue that it was these socially- and culturally-constituted cognitive schema undergirding the gender dynamics and hierarchy of the Indonesian society that fuelled the pervasiveness of rape, while ensuring that meaningful solutions remained elusive as efforts to re-write the sexual scripts of the country encountered fierce resistance from those who sought to maintain the status quo.