SourceIndonesia introduces first female flogging squad
‘Have no mercy for those who violate God’s law’, police chief says
Samuel Osborne
@SamuelOsborne93
Wednesday 29 January 2020 10:14
Indonesia has introduced a female flogging squad to punish women who violate Islamic law.
The latest recruit of an eight-member team has been pictured punishing an unmarried woman caught in a hotel room with a man.
The officer, who wore a white cloth mask and a brown burqa, can be seen whipping the back of a woman kneeling on the ground.
“I think she did a good job. Her technique was nice,” Banda Aceh sharia police chief investigator Zakwan told the Agence France-Presse news agency.
The punishment took place in Aceh, the only region in Indonesia that implements sharia law.
Public whipping with a rattan cane for a number of punishments in Indonesia, such as drinking alcohol, adultery and having same-sex relations.
As more women have been charged with morality crimes, Aceh has sought to follow precepts in Islamic law which say women should whip females found guilty of violating sharia.
It has taken years to form the region’s first female unit, AFP reported.
“We train them to make sure they’re physically fit and teach them how to do a proper whipping,” Mr Zakwan told the agency.
To get past the mental hurdle of whipping fellow citizens, Mr Zakwan said, you need to look to God.
“It’s kind of an indoctrination that we give to them so they have a better understanding of their role – have no mercy for those who violate God’s law.”
Human rights groups have condemned flogging as a brutal and barbaric method of punishment.
“Flogging people is a brutal and particularly barbaric practice, no matter who carries out the punishment,” Andreas Harsono, Indonesia researcher at Human Rights Watch, told The Independent.
“Flogging – by women or men – has no place in modern Indonesia, and the government of Jakarta should stop turning a blind eye to this torture.”
Last year, a man and a woman were whipped until they passed out in Aceh.
The 22-year-old man was beaten unconscious during a punishment of 100 lashings, then resuscitated before the flogging resumed.
In a separate lashing, a woman who was sentenced to 30 lashes fell unconscious during her punishment for being found “in the company of a man other than her male guardian”.
Public canings regularly draw large crowds who are allowed to take photos and record the beatings.
Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, has called for the end of public floggings. However, he has little control over Aceh, which was granted a special autonomous status in 2005.
I suppose we now know the Sharia version of the 'hire more women prison guards' joke. On a serious note, my general position is that corporal punishments are not inherently wrong per se when embedded in the appropriate cultural practices and below a threshold of serious harm, but it still troubles me whenever it's expanded for anything but the most serious offences, and I won't pretend that the expansion of floggings further in Indonesia doesn't make me uneasy (the establishment of a female flogging squad necessarily means that those courts which had previously declined to pursue it as a penalty for women will no longer be able to cite modesty and tradition in combination to justify that stance.) This is in no small part because of the severity of the floggings involved as well as the relatively minor nature of the offences and the religious justification for the penalty.
