Sharman Stone (Courtesy of DFAT)

Women's empowerment is enjoying greater visibility these days as more and more women speak up against violence and seek to redefine their roles in society. To this end, governments must be ready to listen to the most marginalized of voices. The Jakarta Post’s Dian Septiari recently interviewed Australia’s ambassador for women and girls, Sharman Stone, who visited Indonesia to promote gender equality. Her visit coincides with the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, a United Nations-backed international campaign launched on Nov. 25. Below are excerpts from the interview:

Question: Could you tell us a bit about how you are working with Indonesia on gender equality?

Answer: I have been working with civil society and governments where we share the same ideals. [Australia and Indonesia] have mutually invested in trying to support women and girls for more gender equality in the country, so I particularly focused on women in leadership and economic empowerment, making sure that women can be independent. My work is also to eliminate gender-based violence and Indonesia shares all of those aims.

What does Australia have in common with Indonesia in this space?

We have in fact similar issues; we both have gender-based violence and women who go to their home at night who don't feel safe because their husband or partner is violent toward them. We have about 60 deaths a year in Australia for gender-based violence. [In] Indonesia I think possibly one in three women have experienced it.

We also share the same problem with women who [rear] children, [...] making sure they can still participate in the workforce, have careers and be educated, but not still be expected to have that entire burden of unpaid caring work.

In Australia, we also have terrible drought, fires, floods and climate change challenges, as does Indonesia. Our rural women in particular suffer in those circumstances in keeping their family together. We've got remote indigenous families who have a very different life experience to that of indigenous people in the cities or other nonindigenous people.

What concrete work can Indonesia and Australia work together on?

We are doing a lot together. I was meeting with the leaders of a significant number of civil societies throughout Indonesia through our MAMPU (Empowering Indonesian Women for Poverty Reduction) program, where the Australian government works with civil society and the Indonesian [local] governments on a whole range of areas, including gender-based violence, women's education, family planning, migrating women [and work on] women working at home and being exploited in their employment.

Australia is working with Indonesia through the MAMPU program, making sure that there are [NGO] resources to help those grassroots-level organizations to further build capacity and assist them. It’s a program that has been going on for many years now.

How do you change society’s perspective on gender equality as it relates to victim-blaming?

The media is key in this to make sure the “other” voices are heard.

For example, we recently had a terrible murder of a young woman who was going home from work at night; she went across a soccer field — an open public space — and she was attacked and murdered. It was a terrible crime.

The immediate response was that she should not have been out by herself at night; in fact, one very senior police officer made that statement from Melbourne. The public then [called him out], saying, “That’s not right, you’re blaming the victim”. The police then apologized.

So it is our society’s duty [to look out] for all of our people so they can be safe, and for her to be able to exercise her right to walk across a public place without being attacked. So it’s a case of majority voices being heard.

There are so many issues to tackle in relation to gender equality, whether child marriage or the gender pay gap. How do we prioritize these issues?

I think we can, as we say in Australia, “Chew gum and walk at the same time”. I think we can’t wait for a hierarchy of issues [to manifest], I think we have to attack them all because we've got enough civil societies dedicated to all these different things.

We can’t say, “Well, we’ll now deal with child marriage but we will leave the issue of pay gap until we solve the marriage issue”; we may never get to complete the eradication of child marriage. Certainly the pay gap is so unfair and in Australia we've been tackling that for a very long time; we brought it down to the lowest level ever but still [the gap is] more than 10 percent, and that's not right.

Some of the least-discussed issues in Indonesia are about abortion and female genital mutilation, which is still very prevalent. How can Indonesia push the issue into public discourse when it is still so taboo?

All societies have taboos, the no-go areas. In some societies you can’t talk about women's menstruation, teenage pregnancies or divorce, even. What we've got to have always is [for] human rights [to] override any local cultural tradition, because unfortunately, local cultural traditions may be against the actual human right of the individual, be it man or woman.

We've got to be prepared to talk out loud — respectfully, always — and be able to back up what we're saying with information and statistics, [and] always with the view that the human right of a man or a woman must always be at the forefront, rather than saying that it has “always been done that way”.

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