Last week, Human Rights Watch released a report urging the Indonesian military to stop the practice of “virginity testing” female applicants, which the prominent human rights watchdog called “cruel, inhuman and degrading.”
When asked by reporters what his response was to HRW’s report, the military’s top commander, General Moeldoko, brushed off the criticism. He was adamant in saying that virginity testing was essential to assessing the morality of female recruits.
“Yes, that is one of the conditions So what is the problem?” Moeldoko told reporters at the State Palace on Friday, as quoted by Tempo. “It is is for a good reason, so why should it be criticized?”
HRW and others have numerous strong reasons to criticize virginity testing, which have been deemed “scientifically baseless” by the international community. The Indonesian military specifically uses the “two-finger” method to test whether the hymen of their recruits are intact, a procedure that has been called cruel, invasive and a form of gender-based violence.
Indonesian military spokesman Major General Fuad Basya insisted that doctors performing “virginity tests” could tell the difference between somebody who lost their hymen due to accident or injury and those who lost it because they had “low morals.”
Fuad went on to insist that virginity tests were necessary so that soldiers had the right mentality. “You can imagine, if later a prostitute became a soldier, what would happen to Indonesia’s military,” he told BBC Indonesia.
While Indonesian military leaders seem unwilling to change their ways, HRW timed the release of the report to coincide with next week’s World Congress on Military Medicine taking place in Bali, with the goal of getting members of the international military medical community to formally condemn virginity testing as well.
The message seems to have reached at least some Indonesian lawmakers as well. Tubagus Hasanuddin, a politician from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) and a former high-ranking military official, said there was no connection between virginity and moral.
“If a non-virgin is robbed of her right to join the military, we need to rethink it,” he said, as quoted by The Jakarta Globe.
