FISIP Seminar: Many Aspects Need to be Considered in Order to Realize Gender Equality and Equal Access to Justice for Women

FISIP, UIN News Online – The right for women to access equality still has to be fought for. A number of aspects need to be considered in order to realize gender equality and equal access to justice for women.

This is the conclusion of the international seminar on Gender Equality and Equitable Access to Justice for Women organized by the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (FISIP) UIN Jakarta on Tuesday (11/08/2022). The seminar highlighted various gender equality issues at the global level, especially in Indonesia.

The event which was officially opened by the Dean of FISIP Ali Munhanif and moderated by FISIP Lecturer Iim Halimatusa'diyah presented three female speakers, namely Rachel Rinaldo from University of Colorado Boulder USA, Rika Saraswati from Soegijapranata Catholic University Semarang, and Windy Triana from UIN Jakarta.

Rachel in her presentation explained a number of sociological and legal realities of marriage in Indonesia. Since the 2000s, she explained, there has been an increase in the divorce rate in Java where almost 20 percent of women aged 15-49 years have experienced divorce with the majority of divorce initiatives coming from women.

The level of education, economic independence, and family support are some of the reasons women are more confident in leaving marriage bonds that do not make them happy. A number of marriage regulations, such as the Compilation of Islamic Law (KHI) also provide space for women to file for divorce.

However, she explained, not a few women also have to accept the consequences that divorce lawsuits do not always support women such as the lack of financial restitution to which they were legally entitled. “Many post-divorce women reported not receiving the amount they should have received. The court does have a mechanism enforce but women either not aware or did not want to use the mechanism,” she said.

Meanwhile, Rika observes that there is still a lot of domestic violence against women in the country. Violence in various physical and verbal variants occurs with the husband as the perpetrator.

Rika admits that a number of legal products are made to protect women so that it can be said that women actually have access to justice. But in reality, various accesses do not all help women themselves.

“The experience of domestic violence victims among Indonesian women illustrates that they have the opportunity to access justice. However, not all resources are helpful and useful in certain individual cases,” said Rika.

According to Rika, there are a number of reasons why women have difficulty accessing justice. Among them, the perspective of law enforcement officers who encourage women to resolve their problems with reconciliation.

“Another reason is the high number of revocations of reports of domestic violence, for example due to unclear marital status,” she added.

Furthermore, Windi believes that there is still a reality that does not adequately support gender equality, which can be traced to the lack of gender awareness education itself. In terms of legal education, the legal education curriculum that explicitly mentions gender is considered very minimal.

Windi's research on the legal education curriculum in a number of Islamic universities, for example, has only one gender-focused course, namely Family Law and Gender. In addition to only weighing 2 credits, the status of the course is also an elective course so that there is no obligation for students to take the course.

“The issue is the lack of curriculum credits and the lack of updated discussions on gender issues. So that the integration of gender issues in Islamic law education is not optimal,” she concluded. (zm/usa)