Female Indonesian Police Officers Subjected To Archaic And Invasive Virginity Test Before They’re Allowed On The Force”
If you are female and want to be a police officer in Indonesia, there is an important matter that must be attended to first. One would think the most important factor in assessing whether someone should become a police officer would be passing a physical fitness or mental aptitude test. In Indonesia, maybe that is the case if you are born with a penis but all women who want to join their police force have to submit to a “virginity test” first. And this is the part where you will all want to toss your computers on top of a bonfire and give up on humanity.
Here is a video from Human Rights Watch including interviews with female police officer applicants:
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If you are unable to watch the video, from The Washington Post, we have the first-person account of a 19-year old Indonesian woman who wanted to join the police force. Here is how this atrocity goes down:
”They put up a curtain so that outsiders could not look inside,” she told Human Rights Watch in a report published Tuesday. ”My group of about 20 girls was asked to enter the hall and was asked to take off our clothes, including our bras and underpants.”
Then came the exam.
”We’re asked to sit on a table for women giving birth,” she said. ”A female doctor did the virginity test ”” the ”˜two-finger’ test.”
Sick to your stomach yet? I know I am. This is obviously wrong for about a million different reasons but let’s start with the most glaring- this “test” tells a doctor nothing about a woman’s virginity (or lack thereof). Some women are born without a hymen at all and many have sex without any rupture or bleeding. It can also be ruptured by tampon use and it can regenerate after a woman loses her virginity. In short, it is proof of absolutely nothing.
And of course, this test is a total human rights violation and borders on sexual assault. The women do consent and a physician performs the exam but it’s coercion at best and a total violation of their privacy no matter how you slice it:
Had the aspiring female officer failed the virginity-test, the academy would have rejected her. According to a series of draconian requirements, the Indonesian National Police, which is in the midst of a recruiting blitz to attract female cops, doesn’t accept women who are married. It doesn’t accept women older than 22. And it doesn’t accept women who aren’t virgins.
To ensure that such edicts are met ”” and that ”prostitutes” don’t join the police force ”” they test the women’s hymen to see if it’s intact.
I guess it’s encouraging that they are trying to recruit female officers at all but these standards are positively disgusting. Draconian really is the perfect word. I realize there are age limits for people joining a police force even in the United States but they can’t be married? And they have to be virgins? How do these factors have any bearing on whether they could perform their job functions? Oh, wait- they don’t. These requirements are obviously in place to discriminate and to make it as unattractive as possible for women to want to join the police force. Any police force who wants to subject women to a bullshit “virginity test” before becoming one of their own obviously does not respect women at all. It’s as though they are putting this “chance” out there so that women can try but once they can’t recruit enough women willing to undergo what basically amounts to a form of sexual assault they can throw up their hands and say “See? We should only recruit men!”
It will be a long time before Indonesia changes it’s policies in this regard of the thoughts of local councilor, Bambang Bayu Suseno, are any indication of the general way of thinking on this topic:
Bambang, a father of three daughters, found support among many local councilors. Virginity tests ”need to be discussed,” one said.
Bambang said only through the testing of a girl’s virginity will she know the consequences of immorality. ”She could not be easily influence, coaxed and surrender herself to her boyfriend or other parties seeking advantage of teenage girls,” he told the Jakarta Post. ”Because, if she is later tested, and it turns out that she is no longer a virgin, she knows the consequences that she could not continue her studies.”
My mind is blown. They clearly believe in the veracity of this test and also, in the need to keep women concerned for their own chastity and morality. I am sick to my stomach that this is what young women face in this country if they want to perform a job that millions of women in other countries are able to do just as easily as their male counterparts. What a complete and total injustice in every way.
(Image: YouTube/Washington Post)
