An emotionally and physically abusive marriage of 11 years led Rani Miranti to join a club that has trained her in martial arts, enabling her to stand up against violence.
Miranti is one of the growing number of Indonesian women who are taking self-defense classes as gender-based violence remains a challenge in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation.
“Government protection usually comes after violence has happened, while we never know when it will come,” said the 38-year-old single mother of three children. “Unfortunately, when it suddenly comes, no one can help. So, we need to have self-defense capabilities.”
Photo: AP
The Indonesian National Commission on Violence Against Women, known as Komnas Perempuan, recorded 289,111 cases last year, a decrease of about 12 percent from 339,782 in 2022, the year when a law against sexual violence was enacted.
However, the commission said that the latest data represents “a tip of the iceberg” in gender-based violence.
The true number of cases is suspected to be significantly higher, it said in its annual report for last year, which was released in March.
A large number of cases went unreported because of several factors: limited access for victims to complaint services, a weak case documentation system and a high level of social stigma toward victims of violence, the report said.
The Indonesian parliament approved a far-reaching law in 2022 that sets punishment for sexual violence and guarantees provisions, restitution or other remedies for victims and survivors.
The law was passed a week after an Indonesian high court sentenced an Islamic boarding school principal to death for raping at least 13 students over five years and impregnating some of them. The girls were between 11 and 14 years old and were raped over several years, drawing public outcry over why he was not caught earlier.
This month, Indonesia’s electoral commission fired its chair after finding him guilty of sexual assault following a complaint by an employee. It was the latest in a series of the country’s high-profile cases of violence against women in a vast archipelago nation of more than 277 million people.
With cases growing, more Indonesian women and girls who feared physical violence turned to alternative ways of ensuring their safety, including self-defense classes and clubs.
For Miranti, whose husband repeatedly attacked and physically abused her, Muay Thai is the most suitable self-defense, as it helps her gain more skills, self-confidence and prevention techniques.
Wearing a red hijab and boxing gloves, Miranti, who teaches at a Jakarta Islamic primary school, demonstrated her skill in pounding a heavy bag and kicking toward her sparring partner.
It is part of her training routine in a mixed martial arts course in eastern Jakarta, where she enrolled almost two years ago after she decided to get out of her abusive marriage in 2018.
With origins in Thailand, Muay Thai is a form of kickboxing that includes knee and elbow strikes, kicks and punches.
“Now, I have a way ... I have the skill to fight back, but even more importantly, I have learned to avoid situations by being more aware of my surroundings,” Miranti said.
Miranti’s coach, Rahimatul Hasanah, said that she was overwhelmed by the increasing demand of women who want to learn martial arts, especially in private training, as female Muay Thai instructors are hard to find.
“Many aren’t going to feel comfortable to be coached by male instructors, or need a private class at home,” she said.
Hasanah said that most of the women who have attended her self-defense classes are timid, with some experiencing abuse in the past.
“Learning physical self-defense not only gives the tools to control their reactions to negative situations, but also can build the confidence for mental defense, too,” she said.
Irish-language rap group Kneecap on Saturday gave an impassioned performance for tens of thousands of fans at the Glastonbury Festival despite criticism by British politicians and a terror charge for one of the trio. Liam Og O hAnnaidh, who performs under the stage name Mo Chara, has been charged under the UK’s Terrorism Act with supporting a proscribed organization for allegedly waving a Hezbollah flag at a concert in London in November last year. The rapper, who was charged under the anglicized version of his name, Liam O’Hanna, is on unconditional bail before a further court hearing in August. “Glastonbury,
TENSIONS HIGH: For more than half a year, students have organized protests around the country, while the Serbian presaident said they are part of a foreign plot About 140,000 protesters rallied in Belgrade, the largest turnout over the past few months, as student-led demonstrations mount pressure on the populist government to call early elections. The rally was one of the largest in more than half a year student-led actions, which began in November last year after the roof of a train station collapsed in the northern city of Novi Sad, killing 16 people — a tragedy widely blamed on entrenched corruption. On Saturday, a sea of protesters filled Belgrade’s largest square and poured into several surrounding streets. The independent protest monitor Archive of Public Gatherings estimated the
FLYBY: The object, appears to be traveling more than 60 kilometers per second, meaning it is not bound by the sun’s orbit, astronomers studying 3I/Atlas said Astronomers on Wednesday confirmed the discovery of an interstellar object racing through the solar system — only the third-ever spotted, although scientists suspect many more might slip past unnoticed. The visitor from the stars, designated 3I/Atlas, is likely the largest yet detected, and has been classified as a comet, or cosmic snowball. “It looks kind of fuzzy,” said Peter Veres, an astronomer with the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, which was responsible for the official confirmation. “It seems that there is some gas around it, and I think one or two telescopes reported a very short tail.” Originally known as A11pl3Z before
Police have found 381 corpses piled up in a private crematorium in northern Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, the local prosecutor’s office said on Sunday, attributing the grisly find to negligence. “Preliminarily, we have 381 bodies that were deposited irregularly in the crematorium, which were not cremated,” said Eloy Garcia, communications coordinator of the Chihuahua state prosecutor’s office. Garcia said the corpses were “stacked” in no apparent order in various rooms of the building where the crematorium operates. They were “just thrown like that, indiscriminately, one on top of the other, on the floor,” he said. All the bodies had been embalmed. Instead of
RSS