The stigmatisation of widows and divorcees (<i>janda</i>) in Indonesian society
Indonesia and The Malay World, Jan 2, 2016
This special issue is devoted to the study of janda (widows and divorcees) in Indonesia and the s... more This special issue is devoted to the study of janda (widows and divorcees) in Indonesia and the stigma that they experience. The single word janda refers to both widows and divorcees in Indonesian, but can be made more specific with the addition of qualifiers: janda mati (widow) and janda cerai (divorcee). The idea for the special issue grew out of a team research project in which researchers from the University of Queensland and the University of Western Australia came together in three workshops held in April, October and December, 2013, to study the social and cultural construction of jandahood. As far as we know, this was the first time that janda had been identified and studied as a distinct social group and identity. The reason we proposed the project was our understanding that janda, as individuals and as a group, suffered discrimination and disadvantage in contemporary Indonesia. We knew of extreme disadvantage and widow sacrifice in India, and in the precolonial Indic courts of Bali, though in Bali it was only a small number of minor wives of royalty who committed sati (Creese 2004). We were not proposing that widows in Indonesia share the plight of widows in India. It was, rather, our knowledge of women in today’s Indonesia who are unhappily married but remain married out of fear of the stigmatisation of divorce; of women we know to be divorced but who keep it to themselves, as best they can, out of shame; and of the rash of unflattering representations of janda in contemporary sinetron (Indonesian soap operas), pop songs and movies. The impetus for the project was thus the researchers’ awareness that janda are routinely stigmatised in everyday Indonesian social life. Single and unattached, many with dependent children and living in straitened economic circumstances, janda comprise a major disadvantaged social grouping within contemporary Indonesian society. Some have lost the breadwinner in the family and need to eke out a livelihood for themselves and their children for the first time; for others, the loss of a husband is not felt as an economic loss. There are an estimated 9 million Female Heads of Household (FHH) in Indonesia, 14% of the total of 65 million households in Indonesia (Akhmadi et al. 2010: 1). The vast majority of FHH are janda. They figure disproportionately among the poor and vulnerable (Akhmadi et al. 2010). Many janda are also vulnerable because of their uncertain marital status. Many do not have legally recognised marriages and/or divorces, as is common in Lombok (Platt 2010). Some were child brides, not meeting the minimum legal age of marriage for women of 16 years. Many were married secretly or unofficially (nikah siri – see Parker et al. 2016). Many are poor and live remote from government offices and so cannot afford the cost of a formal marriage registration or divorce (Akhmadi et al. 2010). Some have been abandoned by their husbands. Although the concept of the Female-Headed Household is well established
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