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BERDAYA PROGRAM: To reduce child marriage practices by empowering the role of policy makers, community leaders and families

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An effort to reduce the practice of child marriage through the revitalization of formal and non-formal institutions, empowerment of community leaders and families in urban areas; Bogor, Cirebon, Makassar and North Jakarta.

Rumah KitaB cooperates with Australia Indonesia Partnership for Justice (AIPJ2) held a workshop program introduction and team up for the BERDAYA program at Royal Padjadjaran hotel, Bogor, 2-3 August 2017.
Lies Marcoes, program officer said that the marriage rate of children in Indonesia is increasing. Citing data from BPS and UNICEF, one in four (1: 4) women married before reaching 18 years. One of the key elements of this practice is the institutions that become the entrance to the marriage of children.

“Research conducted by Rumah KitaB in nine regions show that formal and non-formal leaders are the main keys to prevent this practice, because in their hands the child marriage can take place or be rejected,” the director of Rumah KitaB confirmed in the opening.

All field coordinators and their assistants attended in the workshop. In addition, the workshop materials are strengthened by resource persons such as Ir. Dina Nurdinawati, MA from IPB presenting the results of Rumah KitaB, Rahima, and UNICEF surveys in Sumenep and Probolinggo. The survey with nearly 1,000 respondents sees significant differences between the two regions in terms of child marriage practices and emphasizes the importance of working with men in both formal and informal institutions. As the main tool of the program is the socialization of the media, there came three resource person regarding this issue; Civita from Matabiru who shared the website of Jarnganaksiremaja.com run by AKSI Network and Rumah KitaB, Mulyani Hasan, senior journalist and coordinator of BERDAYA program in South Sulawesi and Mira Renata, AIPJ2 Communication Media Management Program.

Knowing that the selection of research locations is also related to efforts to prevent radicalism targeting families and girls, this workshop is discussed with a very deep logical thinking that connects fundamentalism and child marriage. One of the most important sessions in this workshop was the decision making of change indicator guided by Lia Berliana Marpaung, gender specialist from AIPJ2 and Mrs. Lies Marcoes from Rumah KitaB. By using the Gender Analysis Pathway strategy mandated by Bappenas, Rumah KitaB designed the indicators using the theory of change; Access, Participation, Benefit, Control.
Theory of Change is also used as a measurable parameter. The change ladder includes:

Teenagers fight to end child marriage

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Child marriage is still rampant in some parts of the archipelago for various reasons, from cultural beliefs to parents who still believe that marriage is an ultimate solution to the economic problem.

While in fact, child brides must sacrifice their adolescence to deal with domestic life, experiencing early pregnancy and facing other possible health problems that can put their lives at risk.

Angelina Ratu, 18, a university student from East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), said child marriage is still common in her hometown. She is one of those lucky young girls who grew up in a family that prioritizes education.

“Many young girls, especially in my area, still fall victim to child marriage. In order to at least minimize it, there must be [communal] self-awareness,” she said, adding that she actively teaches teenagers in her community about the physical and psychological risks of child marriage.

Angelina’s active involvement in advocating education and her aspiration to become a leader brought her to Jakarta to participate in the annual Sehari Jadi Menteri (Minister for a Day) event at the Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Ministry on Oct. 11 to commemorate this year’s International Day of the Girl.

She was among 21 teenagers who passed a nationwide selection organized by PLAN International Indonesia and the ministry, and supported by UNICEF and non-governmental organization on gender equality Aliansi Aksi.

Prior the event, the 21 teenagers joined a three-day leadership training aimed at empowering them to fight child marriage in their respective communities.

Afterward, they formulated a nine-point strategy to end child marriage, one of which is asking the central government and city administrations to raise the minimum legal marriageable age for children through various regulations, including the government regulation in lieu of law (Perppu), ministerial decree (Permen) and city bylaws.

Currently, the 1974 Marriage Law includes a minimum legal marriage age of 16 years for women and 19 years for men. In some parts of Indonesia, child marriages can involve girls as young as 13 years old.

According to the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) and the Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR), there has been no significant decrease in the number of child marriages in the past eight years. Young women who wed under the age of 18 accounted for 27.4 percent of total marriages in 2008. The number decreased to 24.7 percent in 2011, but went up to 25.7 percent in 2017.

Kurnia Henderika Alberthus, a high school student who also comes from NTT, said teenagers should be empowered to have the courage to make their parents understand the importance of education. Having the audacity to have such an argument with parents, she said, was really important.

“We have to keep struggling by empowering ourselves with knowledge and tell our parents to know about the consequences [of child marriage],” she told the Post.

“If parents [believe] that education is a priority, they will encourage their children to go to school,” she said.

The 21 teenagers participating in the Minister for a Day event shared the same commitment to stopping child marriages in the country by becoming brand ambassadors in their respective provinces.

“We are proud of this event. The teens have gone through quite a long selection process. We hope you can keep your spirits high and continue your life as champions — as teenagers who pioneer the prevention of child marriage,” Lenny N. Rosalin, the Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Ministry’s undersecretary overseeing child development, told participants.

***

Agus Dwi Hastutik

The Jakarta Post

The writer is an intern at The Jakarta Post

Sumber: http://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2017/11/09/teenagers-fight-to-end-child-marriage.html

Child marriage: Written in the verses?

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Published in The Jakarta Post, Paper Edition 27 May 2016.

In many studies on child marriage in Indonesia, economic motivation is said to be the major driver behind this practice. This premise is not completely misleading. However, I once met a teenager who wanted to get married because she felt sinful after hanging out alone with a boy who was not her muhrim or closest family.

In another case, a girl “insisted” that her male friend marry her after they exchanged several text messages. Deep in her heart, she liked this boy, but she feared exchanging text messages could lead her toward “unwanted feelings and behavior”. Getting married therefore became the only solution for her to express her affection toward the opposite sex.

After the lovebirds got married, she and her “husband” promised to refrain from having sexual intercourse until they both graduated. They still live separately in different boarding houses and only meet for dinner. Her “husband” is not yet able to support her, as his own daily needs are still covered by his scholarship. But she said proudly, “this is what I call ‘dating after marriage’.”

Cases such as those aforementioned, involving 17 to 20-year-olds in my encounters, do not occur only in small villages or remote areas. Such cases also occur in urban areas, at universities and in educated, middle-income Muslim society.

To these people, the body, particularly women’s bodies and sexuality, are alarming. Women’s sexuality leads to worries about the many horrible things that could possibly happen. Women are not allowed to express their sexuality in any way outside the institution of marriage. They have tried to limit their contact with the opposite sex by covering their heads and avoiding any skin contact. But even using hijab is not enough. They need more assurance.

People learn these viewpoints and believe them as truths taken from various sources, including religious texts and references. These views often apply a purely textual approach in interpreting the texts and neglect the context in which they arose. This approach constricts their imagination about social interaction; anything related to male-female relationships is forbidden, except as legally avowed through marriage.

Furthermore, within circles holding such beliefs, marriage is used as a means to legitimate subordination of women, and even their repression. Women are not allowed access to contraceptives because, in their view, family planning is not in line with sharia. Furthermore, their religious beliefs also call on them to multiply the Prophet Muhammad’s followers by giving birth to as many children as possible.

Their desire to fulfill God’s command is commendable, but the gender division of labor and women’s continuous reproductive work are the consequences of this imbalance in gender relations.

For girls, public space excludes them and is male-dominated. For example, when a girl gets pregnant and gives birth, if she is still at school or university, she will automatically take maternity leave for at least one semester, or simply drop out. She will gradually stop being involved in student organizations and will not be allowed to socialize, except perhaps for running household errands. The husband, on the other hand, continues at school or in his job, and all the domestic work is handled by his wife.

The cases above indicate that textualist religious viewpoints are very powerful in legitimating child marriage. Typically, children do not have a voice in decision-making. However in a few cases the girls insist on an early marriage by persuading their parents using religious texts and references.

Follow-up studies are needed to further explore the religious views and interpretations used to encourage child marriage. Our research outfit, Rumah Kita Bersama ( Our Collective House ), has initiated this effort by publishing a guide to religious texts on child marriage, Fikih Kawin Anak. However, further support is still needed from a more progressive Islamic perspective to counter prevailing arguments.

Surely every marriage is supposed to bring about virtue and harmony. However, when a marriage is not supported by equal rights between husband and wife, marriage always becomes an arena of subordination which pushes women into the domestic space, with increasingly unbalanced gender and power relations.

Indonesian Muslim Feminists: Islamic Reasoning, Rumah Kitab And The Case Of Child Brides

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Written by Nelly van Dorn-Harder, Professor at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. Published by Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs, Boston University, USA.

 

Indonesian: not Arab!

Indonesia is a vast country with numerous languages, cultures and ethnicities. It should not surprise us that discussions about Islam reflect the complexity of the country. In spite of this diversity, authorities on Indonesian Islam agree that several distinctive features set it apart from Middle Eastern Islam. According to Azyumardi Azra, Indonesian Islam is firmly embedded in local cultures, and the state is democratically governed under the common ideological platform of the Pancasila model that in principle sanctions the full legal presence of Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, and Bahai communities.1 Furthermore, a distinctive feature is that for nearly half a century the majority of Indonesian Muslim leaders have allowed women to hold religious and secular leadership roles. This development is also discernible in various mainstream Muslim organizations of which Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah are the largest, and “can be seen as a perfect representation of Islamic-based civil society.”2

Simply put, the prevalent opinion is that Indonesian Islam is not Arab and never will be. Yet, when in 1998, the Suharto regime fell and the country’s political system became more democratic, Islamic movements whose main goal was to align Indonesian Islam more closely with interpretations from Middle Eastern Arab countries started to influence the country’s public life. The new-found democratic freedoms not only allowed for a pluralization of Islamic ideals, but also led to a fragmentation of religious authority. Communal boundaries were redrawn and relatively small numbers of extremist Muslim thinkers disproportionately influenced the creation of new laws and Islamic regulations. New political and religious actors emerged, all presenting new possibilities for what Hoesterey and Clark referred to as a glorious Islam “in the abstract.”3 In this crowded landscape, women, their bodies, roles, and rights became the symbolic bearers of how the abstract should be translated into reality.4

This new religious reality begs the question as to how Muslim feminist activists belonging to the mainstream organizations of NU and Muhammadiyah negotiated some of the sweeping changes in religious attitudes. While feminism comes in many forms, in this context I refer to Muslim feminists; women and men for whom the key to women’s liberation is found in re-interpreting the Qur’an and other Islamic sources (for example the Tradition or Hadith) from the perspective of gender equality. Their reference point is the belief that the sources for women’s liberation are the Muslim holy texts, but that these have been misread and abused to subordinate women.5 In Indonesia, feminists, Muslim or not, fight several battles against multiple forms of injustice perpetrated against women. Among others, they address issues connected to domestic violence and other forms of violence against women such as human trafficking, women’s reproductive rights (including FGM, Female Genital Mutilation)6, polygamy, unregistered or secret forms of marriage (nikah siri), child marriage (pernikahan di bawah usia, or pernikahan dini), and women’s public and private leadership roles.7

In this essay I focus on the strategies developed against the practice of underage or child marriage by the non-governmental organization Rumah Kitab (Rumah Kita Bersama). The rationale for this choice is that the practice of child or underage marriage touches on several of the main priorities of the Muslim feminist agenda as it includes the issues of secret marriage and polygamy. Furthermore, in Indonesia and many Muslim majority countries it is a brazen infraction of state marriage laws that impose a minimum age for women and men. Underage marriage is a form of violence against women, it threatens a girl’s (reproductive) health, and is often performed in secret as by necessity
it remains unregistered. In many instances the child bride enters a polygamous union.

According to the 2015 report by Coram International, 7.8% of Indonesian brides were 12-14 years old and 30.6% were 15-17 at the time of marriage (according to Indonesian law, the minimum age for girls is sixteen and for boys, nineteen).8 These numbers are higher than the numbers given by Unicef in 2014 that estimated 21% of Indonesian women between the age of 20-24 to be married before the age of eighteen of whom 3% were under the age of 15.9 The practice is mostly driven by socioeconomic factors such as poverty and local customs. For example some areas perform so-called “hanging” marriages (kawin gantung): a girl child is officially married but sexual relations are postponed until she has reached maturity. Child marriage is also supported by rigid gender norms that normalize male violence against women. Certain radical Muslim groups have promoted the practice as proof of Islamic correctness and a means to protect the bride’s honor. Some groups even present the practice as “cool.”

Get the full journal here: https://www.bu.edu/cura/files/2016/02/Boston-University-presentation-January-29-2016-van-Doorn-2.pdf 

Launching on Fiqh on Child Marriage Book

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Fikih Kawin Anak: Membaca Ulang Teks Keagamaan Perkawinan Usia Anak-Anak (Fiqh on Child Marriage: Rereading Religious Texts on Marriage in Childhood) book was launched on Thursday, October 8, 2015. The event was opened by the Director General of Islamic Community Guidance, Ministry of Religious Affairs, (Dirjen Bimas Islam) Prof. Dr. H. M. Machasin, M.A. with remarks by the Chairperson  of the Nahdlatul Ulama Executive Board (PBNU), K.H. Sulthon Fathoni, M.Si. Present were senior women’s activists, such as Ibu Saparinah Sadli, Ibu Syamsiah Ahmad, Ibu Tini Hadad, and Ibu Zumrotin K. Susilo, and also male activists, such as K. H. Husein Muhammad, a former commissioner of National Commission for Women (Komnas Perempuan). The event was also covered by Kompas in its Friday, 9 October 2015 edition.

The event was attended by a wide range of participants, not just activists, with a good balance of males and females. Rumah KitaB distributed 237 copies of the book at the launch, and interestingly, the chairperson of NU’s tanfiziyah (board) Prof. Makruf Amin, asked for 20 copies, because PBNU will be holding a fatwa session to support the government’s effort to raise the marriage age.

There was quite a  dynamic discussion on how to interpret the texts on child marriage in the launch of the book “Fiqh on Child Marriage: Re-reading Religious Texts on Marriage in Childhood”.

peluncuran fikih kawin anak

peluncuran fikih kawin anak peluncuran fikih kawin anak

 

In the introduction, the Director of Yayasan Rumah Kita Bersama, Ibu Lies Marcoes, M.A., explained that the purpose of this study is to complement social studies on child marriage, in which there is always a religious element used in justifying the practice. In the Constitutional Court’s rejection of the judicial review proposed by women’s activists seeking to raise the marriage age, and in other social/ political experiences that seek fulfillment of women’s reproductive health rights, it is always the case that religious arguments are used as an important foundation by both those supporting these efforts and those opposing them.

Thus, it was no exaggeration when Ibu Badriyah Fayumi, Lc, M.A., one of the resource persons, a female ulama who is highly respected for her excellent mastery of the classical religious text, said that if only the Constitutional Court justices had read the book Fiqh on Child Marriage, their opinions could well have been different and they would have understood and agreed that the marriage age needs to be changed in line with the needs of the current era. First, because the book has very strong religious references; second, because the book also contains data on the dire social and health consequences of child marriage; and equally important, the book examines the political practices of progressive efforts to raise the marriage age in Muslim countries elsewhere in the world.

At the book launch, the Director General of Islamic Community Guidance, Prof. Dr. H. M. Machasin, M.A. said that normatively, it is almost impossible for child marriage to satisfy the requirements for building a strong, healthy family with a proper vision. Fiqh cannot be applied as static law, because from the very beginning it has always been useful to seek solutions to social/religious problems relating to religious law, with a wide range of opinions. The problem is that it is always difficult for fiqh to resolve this diversity of opinions, and therefore the presence of the state is needed to build legal unification. Many efforts have been undertaken by the state, including the Marriage Law and the Compilation of Islamic Law (KHI). Both of these are political products and represent a compromise between fiqh and efforts to moderate Islamic law. Logically, both of these (the Marriage Law and KHI) can be reexamined when a new compromise is needed, for example with regard to raising the marriage age. And in his opinion, this book is an effort to provide a reference as a basis for why child marriage needs to be reexamined.

At the book launch, Rumah KitaB presented three resource persons, all of whom hold important positions, in MUI, PBNU and Muhammadiyah. Dr. Moqsith Ghazali, M.A. is from NU’s reconciliation commission and also a member of MUI; Ibu Badriyah Fayumi, Lc, M.A. is in a very strategic commission in MUI, the fatwa commission; and Ustadz Dr. Fahmi Salim, Lc, M.A., is in MUI’s dakwah (outreach) commission, and also holds a position in Muhammadiyah, with a very conservative and textualist perspective. Nevertheless, with their respective approaches, they appreciated and agreed with the efforts made by Rumah KitaB in offering to reexamine the texts related to child marriage.

Their suggestion was to prepare a very short version of the book, like a policy brief, as a handy reference for judges and decision makers, such as KUA (Religious Affairs Offices), in rejecting the practice of child marriage.