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Atnike Nova Sigiro amplifying women’s voices
Voice for the voiceless: Atnike Nova Sigiro has a long history of activism before joining Jurnal Perempuan
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Voice for the voiceless: Atnike Nova Sigiro has a long history of activism before joining Jurnal Perempuan.
Atnike Nova Sigiro and her team at Jurnal Perempuan embrace women’s voices and their continuous struggles for equality and empowerment.
When RA Kartini wrote the letters that would later be compiled into the book titled Habis Gelap Terbitlah Terang (Out of Darkness Comes Light), she spoke of ideas that were unthinkable in the Indonesian society of her era: women’s emancipation.
Now, more than a century after Kartini’s passing, her legacy lives on through the numerous women’s movements and rights groups in the country. One of them is quarterly feminist publication Jurnal Perempuan, which has just published its historic 100th issue under the helm of Atnike Nova Sigiro.
Serving as the journal’s executive director since 2017, Atnike said that her interest in the women’s movement and feminism grew from her childhood experience.
“Born to a Batak family, I observed how customs tend to set women as a complement to traditions, whereas men are given a public role as decision-makers,” she recalled.
“During my teenage years, I also experienced harassment in public spaces, although at that time I could not explain what all of them meant,” Atnike recalled.
Atnike remembered that after being subjected to gropes in public, she was always on the lookout when walking outside. She also endured sexist insults made by her school mates that she didn’t understand back then.
“My experiences taught me that education on gender equality and feminism should be taught to boys and girls at an early age.”
In 1994, she took a social welfare major at the University of Indonesia and became involved in a student group, where she became aware of critical social theories, including feminism.
“I read an anthropology book titled No Honey No Money [by Alison J. Murray], and I was impressed with the struggle of [Indonesian] urban-dwelling women who had to work as sex workers, enter into temporary marriages or work as impoverished street traders in the city.”
Atnike became acquainted with a number of human rights and feminist activists, including Gadis Arivia who cofounded the Jurnal Perempuan Foundation in 1995 and launched the journal a year later.
Championing human rights
Atnike has spent her entire career in the field of human rights. In 2000, she started working in the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM) where she assisted many female victims of human rights violations.
“I found untold stories like [...] those facing trauma and stigma from sexual violence and women fiercely demanding justice for their families.”
“The experiences of female victims show that their stories are not just statistics and physical violence, but rather personal stories of women who have survived their various disadvantages both as a victim and as a woman.”
Atnike shifted her focus to advocating for the rights of women in Southeast Asia after joining the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA). She pushed for the ASEAN Regional Plan of Action on the Elimination of Violence against Children (ASEAN RPA on EVAC) and the Elimination of Violence against Women (ASEAN RPA on EVAW).
To stay in touch with Indonesian women’s issues, she joined the Friends of Jurnal Perempuan (SJP) group.
“As a member, I actively wrote for and joined the events of Jurnal Perempuan. From there, my relationship with others in Jurnal Perempuan became even closer,” Atnike said.
In her eyes, Jurnal Perempuan is one of the few organizations actively documenting research on Indonesian women’s movements, particularly after the fall of president Suharto in 1998.
“I think Jurnal Perempuan is one of the works of Indonesian women that must be kept alive. I am amazed by their tenacity, and when cofounder Gadis Arivia asked me to join, I, of course, said yes.”
Historic edition
For its 100th edition published in February, Jurnal Perempuan took the title of Women’s Thoughts and Movements in Indonesia to highlight and reflect on Indonesian women’s movements in the last 20 years of reform in Indonesia.
“The research for this edition found that post-1998 women’s movements have been able to push a normative skeleton for gender equality,” Atnike explained.
The achievements include the 30 percent quota for female legislative candidates in the 2008 Political Parties Law and the enactment of Law No. 23/2004 on the elimination of domestic violence.
The 100th edition was published with the support of the Australia-Indonesia Partnership for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (MAMPU) and the Ford Foundation.
New challenges
Despite several improvements, Atnike notes that Indonesian women still face numerous challenges, including the sexual violence bill, which has been mislabeled by some groups as a pro-adultery bill.
“Law enforcement and victim protection-rehabilitation is far from adequate, and the Criminal Code [KUHP] has been unable to provide justice and protection for victims,” she argues, adding that other women’s issues also deserve equal attention.
Atnike acknowledges that in Indonesia, feminism tends to have a negative association as a product of Western ideology, or it is claimed that it is incompatible with so-called Indonesian values.
“But if we look at feminism as an effort to build a critical view of societal injustice, then feminist ideas have been present since before our independence,” she argued.
Atnike noted that before the country proclaimed its independence in 1945, Kartini had advocated education for women in the early 1900s and Sutartinah, the wife of education figure Ki Hajar Dewantara, was a contributor to gender equality and a precursor to Indonesian nationalism through the educational movement Taman Siswa, founded in 1922.
“To say that feminism is alien to Indonesia is an ahistorical accusation, and thus there is a need to write the history of Indonesian women to counter these claims.”
While female empowerment and participation in politics have come a long way since Indonesia’s independence and the beginning of the Reform Era in 1998, Atnike says that there is still a need for women’s movements to this day.
“For me, there’s no such thing as enough women’s movements. In every era, women will find new contradictions that should be addressed with new strategies,” Atnike said.
— Photos courtesy of Jurnal Perempuan
