Linda Rae Bennett

Zina and the Enigma of Sex Education for Indonesian Muslim Youth.

Sexuality and sex education cannot be divorced from the moral values of the societies within which we must negotiate our sexual identities and relationships. Rather than pandering to the moral panic that is too often associated with the provision of sex education in non‐secular societies where religion is more visibly active in shaping sexual ideals and norms, this article takes up the challenge of investigating a relationship that is often represented as being innately contradictory. It explores the Islamic notion of zina (illicit sex) in relation to the provision of comprehensive sex education for Muslim youth in contemporary Indonesia. The article initially establishes the demand for sex education among Indonesian youth from the overlapping perspectives of health, human rights and Islam. It then explores the notion of zina in detail and exposes how Islamic stipulations against premarital sex are not necessarily in conflict with the provision of sex education. The final section of the article refines the argument in favour of utilizing Islam as a framework for developing religiously appropriate sex education and describes a suitable approach and content for Islamic sex education curricula for Indonesian youth.

Indonesian youth looking towards the future

Selected survey data on future aspirations and expectations from 3565 young Indonesians are presented in this study. Muslim-majority Indonesia is an Asian economic success story. The economy has seen solid growth, leading to an expansion of the private sector. The upward credentialling of the labour market and the rapid growth of the middle class have resulted. Accordingly, the transition to adulthood for working-class and lower middle-class youth has been extended by the necessity to complete schooling and tertiary training before work can be obtained and marriage can occur. Marriage and children still signify adulthood for both sexes. Career preference favoured the professions, especially for girls, despite tight competition for university places. While indicating upwardly mobile aspirations to middle-class life, respondents also demonstrated strong commitment to religious faith and normative family formation in the future. High expectations were tempered by realism though. When asked about obstacles to life dreams, most named material challenges such as family finances. Respondents from more privileged backgrounds were more likely to think non-material factors such as their own laziness would constitute an obstacle, while those lower on the socio-economic scale often indicated they did not have much chance of realising their life dreams due to material and structural constraints.

Patterns of resistance and transgression in Eastern Indonesia: Single women's practices of clandestine courtship and cohabitation

This paper explores how single women in the regional Indonesian city of Mataram express sexual desire in a social, cultural and political climate that idealizes the confinement of female sexuality within marriage. It is based on 21 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with single women, their families and health care providers. Success for young women in negotiating sexual desire is dependent upon their ability to maintain a faultless public reputation and mediate between their desires and those of men. Many single women find ways to pursue their desires by bending the rules of courtship conventions, performing sexual purity in public, while resisting from within the hegemonic sexual culture. However, women who visibly transgress dominant sexual ideals (and in doing so offend the status quo) are stigmatized and ostracized. Single womens practice of resistance and sexual transgression in premarital relationships are represented using the examples of pacaran backstreet (clandestine courtship) and cohabitation prior to marriage.

Domestic Violence in Nusa Tenggara Barat, Indonesia: Married Women's Definitions and Experiences of Violence in the Home

This article contributes to cross-cultural understandings of gender-based violence by examining womens definitions and experiences of domestic violence in Eastern Indonesia. The research was part of a larger study of human rights in maternal and neonatal health and involved a survey that integrated common anthropological practices in its development and delivery. This survey measured the prevalence of emotional and physical abuse, violence during pregnancy, unwanted sex and fear of violence among a sub-sample of 504 married Muslim women. Standard human rights definitions of violence were adapted to create locally appropriate definitions of economic violence, husband infidelity and unwanted sex within marriage. Survey responses indicated that the majority of women believed verbal abuse, threats of harm, economic violence, physical violence, control of womens mobility and a husbands public infidelity to constitute domestic violence. Our exploration of how Indonesian women understand domestic violence reinforces the salience of cultural specificity for different womens definitions of violence, as well as the applicability of internationally recognised definitions of gender-based violence.

Indonesian infertility patients’ health seeking behaviour and patterns of access to biomedical infertility care: an interviewer administered survey conducted in three clinics

BackgroundIndonesia has high levels of biological need for infertility treatment, great sociological and psychological demand for children, and yet existing infertility services are underutilized. Access to adequate comprehensive reproductive health services, including infertility care, is a basic reproductive right regardless of the economic circumstances in which individuals are born into. Thus, identifying and implementing strategies to improve access to assisted reproductive technology (ART) in Indonesia is imperative. The principle objectives of this article are to improve our understanding of infertility patients’ patterns of health seeking behaviour and their patterns of access to infertility treatment in Indonesia, in order to highlight the possibilities for improving access.MethodsAn interviewer-administered survey was conducted with 212 female infertility patients recruited through three Indonesian infertility clinics between July and September 2011. Participants were self-selected and data was subject to descriptive statistical analysis.ResultsPatients identified a number of barriers to access, including: low confidence in infertility treatment and high rates of switching between providers due to perceived treatment failure; the number and location of clinics; the lack of a well established referral system; the cost of treatment; and patients also experienced fear of receiving a diagnosis of sterility, of vaginal examinations and of embarrassment. Women’s age of marriage and the timing of their initial presentation to gynaecologists were not found to be barriers to timely access to infertility care.ConclusionsThe findings based on the responses of 212 female infertility patients indicated four key areas of opportunity for improving access to infertility care. Firstly, greater patient education about the nature and progression of infertility care was required among this group of women. Secondly, increased resources in terms of the number and distribution of infertility clinics would reduce the substantial travel required to access infertility care. Thirdly, improvements in the financial accessibility of infertility care would have promoted ease of access to care in this sample. Finally, the expansion of poorly developed referral systems would also have enhanced the efficiency with which this group of patients were able to access appropriate care.

Moralising Rhetoric and Imperfect Realities: Breastfeeding Promotions and the Experiences of Recently Delivered Mothers in Urban Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Abstract Exclusive breastfeeding is embedded in National Health Law and Regulation in Indonesia and is vigorously promoted by health workers, breastfeeding counsellors and religious leaders. This article explores the transformation of state legislation into breastfeeding promotions that are imbued with moralising assumptions directed at expectant women, new mothers and their partners. Drawing on an 18-month ethnographic study, the rhetoric of breastfeeding promotion messages is contrasted with the narratives of urban middle-class mothers in Yogyakarta. This article highlights the challenges women experience in their attempts to breastfeed and the divergence between the moralising rhetoric of breastfeeding promotions and women’s imperfect lived realities. It demonstrates how dominant health promotion messages construct breastfeeding as a moral issue, insist women are obligated to breastfeed their infants, and fail to acknowledge women’s choice, reproductive agency and bodily autonomy. Such messaging assumes the right of infants to be breastfed, and emphasises the developmental problems likely to befall children who are not breastfed. Gendered expectations that all mothers will assume their breastfeeding role selflessly and dutifully are also embedded in breastfeeding promotion messages. We conclude that breastfeeding promotion messages need to be more inclusive and less moralising in their substance and delivery to better serve Indonesian women. Women are likely to feel more supported and less alienated by breastfeeding promotion messages that recognise the possibility of common breastfeeding challenges, such as difficulty establishing successful breastfeeding, the baby blues, the likelihood of suffering discomfort from breastfeeding in public, and issues with the premature cessation of breastfeeding.

Infertility and inequity across the globe

a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and... not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, in all matters relating to the reproductive system and to its functions and processes. Reproductive health therefore implies that people are able to have a satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so.

Contestations of Gender, Sexuality and Morality in Contemporary Indonesia

Abstract This special issue explores morality agendas in the recent Indonesian context and in doing so, reveals the dynamism of morality debates as they occur in Indonesia and in broader Southeast Asian perspectives. In this Introduction we illustrate how morality (or the perceived lack of morality) acted in part as the impetus for reformasi (reformation), which forced an end in 1998 to the authoritarian New Order era. Subsequently, we discuss how reformasi influenced morality debates in Indonesia by both opening and foreclosing opportunities for tolerance around gender and sexuality. Specifically, we consider the impact of increasing democratisation and how various moral panics have been articulated in the widening space for social and moral critique. The articles in this special issue make a significant contribution to expanding three key themes – morality and boundaries, moral threats, and morality and subjectivity – and shows how these themes intersect with the conceptualisation and functioning of morality in contemporary Indonesia. We then tease out how the five articles in this special issue engage with these themes. Finally, we comment on our observations regarding the increasing visibility of morality debates in Indonesia in the past two decades, and the increasing social currency attributed to morality issues and debates in the public sphere.

Indigenous Healing Knowledge and Infertility in Indonesia: Learning about Cultural Safety from Sasak Midwives

ABSTRACT In this article I demonstrate what can be learned from the indigenous healing knowledge and practices of traditional Sasak midwives on Lombok island in eastern Indonesia. I focus on the treatment of infertility, contrasting the differential experiences of Sasak women when they consult traditional midwives and biomedical doctors. Women’s and midwives’ perspectives provide critical insight into how cultural safety is both constituted and compromised in the context of reproductive health care. Core components of cultural safety embedded in the practices of traditional midwives include the treatment of women as embodied subjects rather than objectified bodies, and privileging physical contact as a healing modality. Cultural safety also encompasses respect for women’s privacy and bodily dignity, as well as two-way and narrative communication styles. Local understandings of cultural safety have great potential to improve the routine practices of doctors, particularly in relation to doctor–patient communication and protocols for conducting pelvic exams.

Infertility, Adoption, and Family Formation in Indonesia

ABSTRACT When combined, primary and secondary infertility affects up to 21 percent of Indonesian couples. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with married heterosexual couples, I explore how intra-family adoption represents a culturally and religiously acceptable pathway to family formation for couples without access to assisted reproductive technologies. I examine how kinship is central to the negotiation of adoption, and to maintaining ethnic and religious continuity within adoptive families. I reveal how adoption can enable infertile women and birth mothers to achieve or escape the dominant expectations of heteronormativity, and discuss intra-family adoption by infertile couples in relation to reproductive stratification and leveling.