Women impoverished: The job security promised by the Prabowo-Gibran Government is nothing but empty talk. After at least 80,000 workers were made redundant in 2024, in 2025 this figure could potentially increase to reach 280,000 workers. The textile industry, where the majority of workers are women, is the industrial sector carrying out these mass redundancies. The current redundancies are a form of structural impoverishment of women and a violation of human rights.

The government has never seriously protected the right to work and income security. The Domestic Workers Bill, which was expected to provide access to decent work guarantees through recognition of domestic workers as formal labour, has actually taken a step backwards, far from the hope of being promptly enacted under the Prabowo-Gibran administration.

Women with disabilities struggle to access employment because physical and mental health certificates remain one of the requirements for labour recruitment. This clearly impacts the exclusion of people with disabilities as workers. Moreover, workplaces do not provide proper accessibility and reasonable accommodations as mandated in the Disability Law, which certainly adds to the difficulties for people with disabilities in working. The Job Creation Law is also discriminatory, explicitly allowing employers to dismiss workers on the basis of disability.

Land grabbing practices and the exclusion of women from food self-sufficiency discourse have resulted in structural impoverishment of indigenous women. This perpetuates forced migration processes that place women in low-wage jobs vulnerable to violence.

Women killed: There is an increase in femicide or cases of women murdered either by strangers or those closest to them: husbands (48 cases), partners, family members, relatives, neighbours. The National Commission on Violence Against Women recorded more than 700 cases of femicide occurring in just 3 years from 2020 to 2023, not counting unreported cases.

Weak law enforcement in femicide cases, lack of protection for femicide case reporters, women with mental and intellectual disabilities being legally classified as incapable of making decisions, and the lack of systemic handling by the police and government, including Parliament which has the authority to revise policies to better protect women, show that the state is complicit in the murder of women! They ignore the enforcement of the Law on the Elimination of Domestic Violence and the Law on Sexual Violence Crimes.

Women criminalised: The National Commission on Violence Against Women recorded at least 15 cases of criminalisation against women human rights defenders using articles from the Criminal Code and the Electronic Information and Transactions Law during the period 2018-2021. Widespread intimidation, threats, and criminalisation threaten women’s freedom of expression in fighting for their rights.

Meanwhile, thousands of women with psychosocial disabilities are confined in mental rehabilitation institutions and experience violence, sexual violence and torture. They undergo forced contraception/sterilisation, sexual harassment and rape. To this day, women with psychosocial disabilities cannot report their cases to complaint services/police because they are confined in prison-like institutions, compounded by complaint/reporting services that passively wait for victims to come forward.

Criminalisation is carried out against farmers fighting for their land, such as the farming communities of Kapa in West Sumatra, Kubu Raya in West Kalimantan, Kwala Langkat in North Sumatra; educators, academics and environmental activists who criticise environmental damage; migrant workers fighting to improve their lives like Sofiatun; and the public disclosure of personal data of human rights defenders who speak out.

Demands of the Indonesian Women’s Alliance: Seeing the various state policy practices that are increasingly anti-women, anti-poor and increasingly damaging to the environment, we:

1. Demand the Prabowo-Gibran Government immediately guarantee the right to decent work for every person by implementing policies that protect workers including women workers, domestic workers, women migrant workers, women farmers, recognition of women fishers, women online motorbike taxi drivers and other public transport drivers, women with disabilities, indigenous women, women educators and academics, female students, LBTIQ+ women, girls, and women victims of violence including sexual violence and murder or femicide.

2. Demand the Prabowo-Gibran Government stop various National Strategic Projects that perpetuate land grabbing practices, forest and environmental destruction, and displace women and indigenous communities from their living spaces.

3. Demand the Prabowo-Gibran Government stop budget efficiency measures in institutions that provide services to women victims of violence, improve implementation of domestic violence and sexual violence laws, including reaching out to mental rehabilitation institutions to provide protection to women with disabilities who are victims of institutional violence and dissolve rehabilitation institutions as sources of deprivation of freedom for women with psychosocial disabilities; and reform security forces and district courts throughout Indonesia to follow up on cases of violence against women from sexual violence to femicide with a gender justice perspective.

4. Demand the Prabowo-Gibran Government stop cutting education budgets, and immediately realise free and democratic education.

5. Demand the House of Representatives immediately pass the Domestic Workers Bill, the Climate Justice Bill, the Indigenous Peoples Bill with a gender perspective and revise the Migrant Workers Protection Law to ensure protection for migrant workers as the state’s responsibility to protect, recognise and respect the rights of communities, especially women, and revoke all policies that are pro-investment and anti-democracy including the Job Creation Law that creates impoverishment with a woman’s face.

6. Invite all elements of civil society and organisations to continue actively voicing their challenges to the current worrying national situation and to fight against discriminatory actions by the government and groups that commit violence against women and minorities, including our LGBTIQ+ friends.

Indonesian Women’s Alliance

Contacts: Ajeng 0811-1313-760 | Afifah 0878-41511-460 | Jumisih 0856-1612-485 | Nabila 0896-9368-0646 | Amel 0822-9185-3619