Systemic Silencing

Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia

Author: Katharine E. McGregor, Scott Straus, Tyrell Haberkorn and Steve J. Stern Series: Critical Human Rights

With careful attention to the historical, social, and political conditions surrounding sexual violence in Indonesia, supported by exhaustive research and archival diligence, Katharine McGregor uncovers a critical piece of Indonesian history and the ongoing efforts to bring it to the public eye.

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Recognizing and addressing enforced military prostitution in occupied Indonesia.

The system of prostitution imposed and enforced by the Japanese military during its wartime occupation of several countries in East and Southeast Asia is today well-known and uniformly condemned. Transnational activist movements have sought to recognize and redress survivors of this World War II-era system, euphemistically known as "comfort women," for decades, with a major wave beginning in the 1990s. However, Indonesian survivors, and even the system's history in Indonesia to begin with, have largely been sidelined, even within the country itself.

Here, Katharine E. McGregor not only untangles the history of the system during the war, but also unpacks the context surrounding the slow and faltering efforts to address it. With careful attention to the historical, social, and political conditions surrounding sexual violence in Indonesia, supported by exhaustive research and archival diligence, she uncovers a critical piece of Indonesian history and the ongoing efforts to bring it to the public eye. Critically, she establishes that the transnational part of activism surrounding victims of the system is both necessary and fraught, a complexity of geopolitics and international relationships on one hand and a question of personal networks, linguistic differences, and cultural challenges on the other.

Critic Reviews

An innovative work with an original, comparative, transnational perspective and impeccable scholarship. The author navigates the history of sexual slavery and human rights activism in Indonesia deftly and with clarity." - Saskia Wieringa, University of Amsterdam

"This is an absolutely outstanding work, an important and devastating account of more than a century of Indonesian history. Readers are given the full context of the conditions that made women and girls vulnerable to extreme exploitation once the Japanese army arrived, and then to silencing and shame under successive regimes until the present day." - Ruth Barraclough, Australian National University

About the Author

Katharine E. McGregor is a professor of Southeast Asian history in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is co-editor, most recently, of Gender, Violence and Power in Indonesia: Across Time and Space.