Indonesians’ fixation on morality and moral issues has been heavily influenced by their religions, cultures, and traditions, as both liberals and conservatives agree. However, the #SahkanRUUPKS campaign to advocate ratification of a bill to eliminate sexual violence has highlighted the different perspectives on morality held by liberals and conservatives in Indonesia. The #SahkanRUUPKS campaign significantly contributed to the bill’s ratification in 2022 and established a higher awareness that the country now possesses a legal framework to end impunity for perpetrators of crimes of sexual violence, writes Yenuarizki Soedjoko
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Indonesia, a country of 260 million inhabitants spread across the archipelago in the Asia Pacific region, has seen a dramatic rise in the number of reported cases of sexual violence over the past decade. Since 2012, the National Committee on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), has recorded more than 3 million cases of sexual violence against women, children, people with disabilities, and members of gender minority groups (Komnas Perempuan, 2023). The filing of a bill in Parliament to eliminate sexual violence in 2012 drove the launch of the #SahkanRUUPKS campaign – a social media campaign to support and accelerate the ratification of a law to eliminate sexual violence. Online commentators, however, responded to the campaign in highly polarised debates. Those in favour believed that the bill would provide a long-anticipated legal framework to ensure protection and restitution for victims of sexual violence. Meanwhile, those opposing the bill responded with patriarchal views that may contribute to the worsening of sexual violence. Most of the opposing views blamed the victims and demanded that they behave “according to Indonesian morality and ethics”.
Morality has always been an important topic in Indonesian society. The urge to seek the moral high ground has been driven by religious and social norms in Indonesian society, as a significantly high percentage of Indonesians acknowledge the importance of religion in their lives (Haerpfer et al., 2020). The conceptual ideas and practices of religion have also been translated into other kinds of social rules, including the constitutionally enshrined official philosophy Pancasila (Morfit, 1981; Siregar et al., 2019). Pancasila has five precepts regulating Indonesians’ belief in One God, humanity, unity, democracy, and social justice. While scholars have debated its nature as an open-ended ideology (Siregar et al., 2019; Pesurnay, 2018), some scholars have also identified its vulnerability to misinterpretation and misuse (Iskandar, 2016; Pesurnay, 2018).
My dissertation focused its research on morality in Indonesian society by adopting the concept of moral dimensions in Moral Foundation Theory (MFT). Social psychologists Jesse Graham and his colleagues delineated a set of five moral dimensions to cater to the expansive dimension of morality: care/harm, fairness/cheating, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation, and loyalty/betrayal (Graham et al., 2013). This variegated categorization provides the basis for a thorough and rigorous account of morality in Indonesian society. In addition, MFT has been applied to analyse other psychological constructs including political ideologies. With two prominent political ideologies in Indonesia frequently engaging in a tug-of-war of online opinions, this study aims to investigate the moral values of liberals and conservatives in their their support of or resistance to the draft bill to eliminate sexual violence in Indonesia. It is important to note, however, that liberalism has a long history of misconceptions and prejudice in Indonesia (Bourchier & Jusuf, 2022). The ideology is mostly perceived to possess a strong association with capitalism and colonization. Nonetheless, liberalism has, to certain extent, combined with a growing wave of feminism, to drive social change in Indonesia in recent years.
The primary data of this study was extracted through qualitative content analysis and focus group discussions. The researcher applied relevance sampling to collect social media content on both Instagram and Twitter as the campaign’s key social media platforms. Simultaneously, two focus group discussions were conducted separately, involving Indonesians who identified themselves as liberals and conservatives. They represent those who supported and those who opposed one or more elements of the #SahkanRUUPKS campaign.
Care vs Harm, Moral Values of the Progressive Liberals
My dissertation argues that the online debates surrounding the #SahkanRUUPKS campaign captured two prominent moral dimensions: care vs harm and fairness vs cheating. Care vs harm is a recurring moral theme, as it highlights the human urge to protect and care for more vulnerable groups such as children, women, people with disabilities, and the elderly (Graham et al, 2013; Wang and Liu, 2021). The #SahkanRUUPKS campaign became an important avenue to empower members of Indonesian society to unlearn patriarchal values that invalidate victims’ lived experiences as well as to reaffirm belief in the victims’ stories, minimise social stigma, and provide support for victims of sexual violence. Fairness vs cheating is another moral theme that frequently appeared in the online campaign of #SahkanRUUPKS. This moral dimension emphasizes the human urge to fight for justice and fairness (Graham et al., 2013). Initiated by gender activists who have also provided support for a victims of sexual violence, the #SahkanRUUPKS hashtag in social media signifies a demand for a fair and reliable legal and justice system as well as social support for victims. Nowadays, many consider social media as coordinating tools in social movements (Shirky, 2011). Social media enables people to converse with each other regarding the substance of the proposed bill, the advantages and disadvantages of the bill, and ways forward to establish an accessible support system for victims of sexual violence.
Conservative Moral Values: Sanctity vs Degradation
The theme of sanctity vs degradation also emerged in the campaign content analysis. The sanctity/degradation dimension stems from the human urge to maintain purity and avoid contamination (Graham et al., 2013; Lewis & Bates, 2011). In this study’s content analysis, the conservative group tended to preserve their traditional views regarding sexual relationships. For example, a religious leader rejected the implementation of a ministerial decree to eliminate sexual violence in educational institutions due to the existence of a clause regarding consent. A previous study found that sanctity/degradation is often associated with personality traits such as a high degree of conscientiousness, extraversion, and low openness, which frequently emerge amongst self-identified conservatives (Haidt et al, 2009).
It is interesting to note that, to some extent, the conservatives and the liberal group do share some moral values. This study’s content analysis discovered that authority/subversion appeared as the moral dimension expressed by both liberals and conservatives. Authority/subversion is the moral value associated with human urge to maintain hierarchical order (Graham et al., 2013). In addition, the analysis of focus group discussions also suggests that moral values associated with social hierarchies, orders, traditions, and social structures are accepted across much of Indonesian society regardless of political ideology. Such values may reflect processes of social as well as the customs and practices of various cultural groups. Tradition is indeed a deeply rooted element in communities in diverse regions across Indonesia.
Simultaneously, there is an emerging critical discourse on feminism, equality, justice, and human rights popularised through various media platforms. The impact of social media enables its tech-savvy social media users to consume myriad sources of information from different political views and ideologies. The rise of feminism has brought about significant social change in Indonesia, particularly by zooming in on the quality of life of the oppressed – as exemplified by the legislation on sexual violence. Exposure to liberal and progressive values has also influenced the perspectives of young conservatives and induced the absorption of some progressive values in Indonesian society.
Morality and Political Ideologies: Moral of The Story
Social psychologists have long studied morality which serves at least three functions in the ways in which people behave: 1) the maintenance of social order, 2) the determination of right from wrong, and 3) the establishment of a sense of moral selfhood (Ellemers et al., 2019). In this particular study, morality has been shown to inflect and inform public debate on an important social issue – the #SahkanRUUPKS campaign, which has generated heated debates between two contrasting political groups in Indonesia: conservatives and liberals. The political divide between liberalism and conservatism is the result of political discourse established in the West. The liberal-conservative continuum has been widely discussed in academic discourse including by social psychologists who investigate its association with social identity (Conover & Feldman, 1981), political perception and voting behaviour (Conover & Feldman, 1981; Jost, 2006), and morality (Lewis & Bates, 2011). In a previous study where scholars measured the relationship between the Big Five personality traits, moral dimensions, and political ideologies, they found a significant relation between a higher score on care fairness and certain personality traits shared by self-identified liberals (Lewis & Bates, 2011). Conversely, a higher score on loyalty-authority-sanctity correlates closely with certain personality traits shared by self-identified conservatives (Lewis & Bates, 2011).
My dissertation brings to the table at least three findings. First, the dissertation discovered that morality in Indonesia seems to be influenced by the hierarchical power of social groups. Referring to the result of the focus group discussions, religion acts as the core idea of morality shaped by an immense number of sociocultural factors, including the official state ideology of Pancasila, social norms and values adopted in each regions, education, family, even individual analysis of its utilization. Therefore, it is understandable that members of civil society demand clear demarcations of morality to end impunity for perpetrators of sexual violence cases through comprehensive regulation.
Second, social media users holding both liberal and conservative views turned the tide for the #SahkanRUUPKS campaign as a battlefield of ideologies. Nonetheless, a movement led by Indonesian gender and feminist groupss sustained an online campaign as a key source of analysis and reliable information regarding substantive discussions surrounding the bill. The campaign successfully contributed to the ratification of the bill in April 2022. The #SahkanRUUPKS campaign has proven the effectiveness of online conversation and education in countering misperceptions and misinformation.
Third, this study also aims to provide evidence from a non-WEIRD [Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic] population. The specific case of Indonesia’s #SahkanRUUPKS offers a unique example of how morality can stand firm to protect those who are most vulnerable instead of those most powerful forces in society who dominate moral discourse in the public sphere.
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*Banner photo by and copyright of CNN Indonesia/Andry Novelio
*About the research:This blog post is based on the author’s LSE MSc dissertation research, which was supported by the Southeast Asia Student Dissertation Fieldwork Grant.
*The views expressed in the blog are those of the authors alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
