One in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. This is not a statistic reserved for a single nation, but for all women worldwide. In 2013, this seems like an impossibly horrible reality. On 14 February the One Billion Rising campaign will see women and men around the world dancing, striking and rising up in a unified voice against violence against women.
I recently wrote a piece for Live Encounters about my responses to recent high profile rapes in Delhi and Melbourne, and now long held concerns on the progress - or be precise, lack of it - on justice-seeking for the victims of mass rapes in Indonesia in May 1998.
Since the piece was published, the dire state of affairs in Indonesia with regards to understandings about sexual violence and sympathy for victims of rape, was again made clear when Judge Muhammad Daming Sunusi, a candidate for the Supreme Court told a parliamentary selection committee that it is possible that a rape victim 'may have enjoyed it'. The Judge quickly retracted his comments, saying he 'was joking', which, in my opinion only makes his comments worse. The selection committee voted unanimously to deny his election to the Supreme Court and Indonesians took to Twitter and other social media to join the condemnation. This might be a tipping point, not unlike what we have seen in India after the rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey, where public protest and anger spills over to legal and importantly, social reform.
