Constitutional Law, International, Religion, Society

Human Rights Watch Demands That Indonesia End Virginity Tests For Female Officers

125px-Flag_of_Indonesia.svgHuman Rights Watch LogoThe Human Rights Watch has issued a rather shocking report that Indonesia continues to require medical exams for female police recruits to confirm that they are virgins. It is the latest example of the abuses and challenges facing women who try to find work in some countries. Other countries with such virginity tests include our erstwhile allies Egypt, India and Afghanistan.

Female officers and recruits described the so called “two-finger” test to determine whether their hymens are intact. The test was performed in at least six different cities. Incredibly, Indonesia’s national police posts the following warning on its website according to the group:

“In addition to the medical and physical tests, women who want to be policewomen must also undergo virginity tests. So all women who want to become policewomen should keep their virginity.”

Maj. Gen. Ronny Sompie has publicly defended the outrageous practice and asked people not “respond negatively” to the tests and insisted that they are aimed at ensuring applicants were free from sexually transmitted diseases. However, even if STDs are for some reason a priority in such recruitment, both male and female recruits also get blood tests for STDs. It is difficult to see how an intact hymen is relevant to that goal. Nevertheless, Sompie insisted that the tests are “done in a professional manner and did not harm the applicants.”

That would of course depend on your definition of “harm.”

Source: ABC

25 thoughts on “Human Rights Watch Demands That Indonesia End Virginity Tests For Female Officers”

  1. Paul – so not even the Queen of England was safe.

    It’s so unfair because no one ever questions or requires a man’s virginity.

    1. Karen – there is a rather infamous case of a Russian nobleman who because of some physical malformation was unable to have intercourse with his bride or anyone else. The session of the line was at stake so some of his buddies got him drunk, held him down and did some street surgery on him. Rumor is it was successful but painful.

  3. Try Einkorn wheat. Low gluten, the most ancient wheat there is. Ferment your bread dough in the fridge for several days, will make it’s glyvpcemic index fall and make it much more digestible. There are safe and natural sugar substitutes out there also, try Natural Mate, combination Stevia and Erythritol. Bake your own bakery and bread. Jovial foods also sells Einkorn pasta, as well as Einkorn flour. Jovial Foods is an Italian company.

  5. Squeeky – I trimmed way down, and my stomach flattened back out, very rapidly once I cut significantly down on all grain and sugar. You can’t do anything strict or un-fun for long, but changing the overall pattern really helped.

    A “beer belly” is more like a “grain belly.”

  7. That’s where we got the grain-based American diet, through scientific consensus that resulted from a poorly planned study.

  8. Squeeky – that’s just awful.

    Reminds me of how the entire food pyramid was based on a study that, unbeknownst to the author, was conducted during Lent. It did not accurately portray the eating habits of a healthy population, but rather an atypical diet during Lent.

    And the government just latched right on.

  9. And what if such a crude test ruptures the hymen? What will happen to those girls, no longer able to “prove” their virginity?

    1. Karen – testing for virginity has always raised an issue for me which you also raised. The accidental breaking of the hymen during the examination. My curiousity was first piqued reading about Elizabeth I who was constantly being examined because she was constantly getting engaged. Each time there would be a royal ceremony where she would have to prove her virginity. She always passed with flying colors, hence The Virgin Queen.

  10. Sounds like a sexual assault. What kind of perv is performing this “two finger test?” A doctor? A female or a male?

    And I’m guessing they don’t welcome married women as police officers.

    We can’t change others’ laws, but we can shine the disinfecting light of public scrutiny on the practice.

  11. @PaulCS

    Speaking of virginity tests, did you ever hear about Margaret Mead and the Samoa thingy??? Kind of where virginity tests meet global warming. . .

    In the fall of 1922, Mead took a course from Franz Boas, her mentor at Columbia University and the godfather of modern anthropology. Boas taught that “social conditioning” was responsible for the complete molding of the individual, and Mead believed what Boas preached.

    When just 24, Mead accepted a grant to travel to Samoa. In the process, she hoped to put her own omnivorous sexual appetite in a more favorable context.

    Although married at the time, Mead was about to enter “an intimate Sapphic relationship” with Ruth Benedict, Boas’ teaching assistant and America’s other famous female anthropologist.

    Once in Samoa, the flighty young Mead dithered aimlessly for months before starting her fieldwork. Finally, with a few weeks left on her grant, she started traveling around the islands with two teenage girls and questioned them eagerly about their sex lives.

    The girls had no idea what Mead was up to. They didn’t know she was an anthropologist or what one even was. But in the waha nui spirit, they proceeded to spin the kind of “recreational lies” Mead wanted to hear.

    Pinching each other all the way, the girls filled Mead’s head with wild tales of nocturnal liaisons under the palm trees.

    “She must have taken it seriously,” one of the girls would confess years later, “but I was only joking. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking.”

    Back in New York, Mead banged out a report that quickly became the book “Coming of Age in Samoa.” According to Mead, Samoan girls often embarked on several sexual adventures each night. And why not? “The concept of celibacy is absolutely meaningless to them.”

    Given “the scarcity of taboos” homosexuality was common, and masturbation was universal. Illegitimate children were welcome. Prostitution was harmless. And divorce was simple and informal.

    This casual familiarity with sex, argued Mead, led to a culture in which “there are no neurotic pictures, no frigidity, no impotence, except for the temporary result of severe illness, and the capacity for intercourse only once in a night is counted as senility.” And all this pre-Viagra!

    Better still, Samoan-style openness dissolved the proprietary tensions – “monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy, and undeviating fidelity” – so problematic in a possessive American culture.

    Best of all, Mead discovered that the difference between Samoans and Americans had nothing to do with biology and everything to do with culture, just as Boas predicted. How about that?

    “What accounts for the presence of storm and stress in American adolescents?” asks Mead. The answer was simple enough: “the social environment.”

    The New York Times, as foolish then and now, described the book as “unbiased in its judgment, richly readable in its style … a remarkable contribution to our knowledge of humanity.”

    The book quickly became a staple in the progressive canon. At the time of Mead’s death 50 years later, “Coming of Age in Samoa” was still selling 100,000 copies a year and was widely considered a “scientific classic.”

    In fact, the Times editors and their fellow travelers in academia had willfully bought into the greatest scientific hoax since the Piltdown Man. A handful of honest anthropologists would later admit, as Kāne did, that Mead’s take on Samoan sexual practices was “comprehensively in error.”

    In reality, at the time of Mead’s visit, every attempt was made to safeguard the virginity of Samoan girls. The almost complete Christian overlay on Samoan culture only reinforced the traditional premium on chastity. There was much at stake.

    At marriage, the bride had to undergo a formal virginity test, and it was not multiple-choice. The results mattered. There was nothing casual about it. The groom-to-be staked his pride and honor on the outcome.

    When a few intrepid anthropologists tried to correct the record, no one wanted to hear them. For a variety of obvious reasons, academia and the media obviously liked what Mead had to say.

    Britannica concise was the rare encyclopedia to admit there was any controversy at all, conceding that later anthropologists questioned “both the accuracy of her observations and the soundness of her conclusions.”

    But in the very next sentence, the reader learns that Mead became “a prominent voice” on issues like women’s rights and nuclear proliferation, and that her great fame owed as much to this as “to the quality of her scientific work.”

    http://www.wnd.com/2013/01/manti-teo-meet-margaret-mead/

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

    1. Squeeky – some of Kiney’s work was based on the fantasy diaries of a gay man which then skewed the data so Kinsey estimated that 1 in 10 males was gay instead of the real number of about 2 in 100. Although Kinsey, his wife and their associates seemed to have had a lot of fun in their attic.

  12. I am not so sure this is a bad idea. What if we started doing virginity tests before a woman could wear a white dress to her wedding??? Sort of a “truth in advertising” thingie???

    Squeeky Fromm
    Girl Reporter

    1. Squeeky – it has long (centuries) been considered permissible for engaged couples to engage in sexual intercourse. You would have to do the exam just before the bride walked down the aisle. 😉

  14. I think by “harm the applicant” he meant did not break the hymen. I do think if the women have virginity tests the men should have them, too, although I am not sure how you would test for it. 😉

  17. Again, the Muslim War on Women, but the US feminists remain silent. They pounce on guys for wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

  20. I’m not terribly surprised to be honest (I lived in neighboring Malaysia for 28 years before leaving); most Muslim countries have terrible human rights records especially when it comes to women and girls.

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