Human rights groups from across the world have been urging Indonesia to stop the discriminatory and invasive virginity tests mandated to be undergone by female military recruits but the country’s army continues to insist that the procedure is necessary to keep a tab on whether the women being recruited are ‘naughty’.

Last month, Human Rights Watch said that the tests, usually conducted with the help of two fingers by medics to check if a woman’s hymen is still intact, are not only unscientific but also a form of gender-based violence. Yet, the military in Indonesia defended the practice as being part of a regular health check requirement that helps the authorities to assess the potential of new female recruits. The military has insisted that they would thus continue with the tests.

“We need to examine the mentality of these applicants. If they are no longer virgins, if they are naughty, it means their mentality is not good,” Indonesian military spokesperson Fuad Basya told the media.

Basya explained that the tests have been conducted for a long time and they help determine whether a female recruit has accidentally lost her virginity or is sexually active. He also said that women who fail the tests are not considered eligible to serve the military.

“We will continue to carry out the test because to be a military person, the most important thing is your mentality. Physical and intellectual requirements are secondary,” Basya said.

Bearing the country’s stubborn stance in mind, Human Rights Watch appealed to Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo to abolish the practice immediately.

“The Indonesian armed forces should recognize that harmful and humiliating ‘virginity tests’ on women recruits does nothing to strengthen national security,” Nisha Varia, director, women’s right advocacy for Human Right Watch said.

This is not the first time that the issue of virginity tests has sparked outrage in Muslim-dominated Indonesia. Police forces receiving a lot of flak for subjecting women to similar checks last year. In 2014, Human Rights Watch reported how female police recruits had been compelled to strip naked before undergoing the usual two-finger test.

As part of the two-finger test, the examining medic makes note of the presence or absence of the hymen and the apparent laxity of the vagina to determine whether the woman in question is habituated to sexual intercourse.

In their latest research, which was conducted from May 2014 to April 2015, the organization interviewed 11 women, who are not only military recruits but also happen to be fiancées of military officers, to find that the practice is in fact widespread in Indonesia’s  army. Basya however rejected the claim that fiancées of military officers were subjected to the tests.

“I felt humiliated. It was very tense, it’s all mixed up,” an unidentified female military applicant who underwent the test in 2013 was quoted as saying in the research. “What shocked me was finding out that the doctor who was to perform the test was a man.”

A female physician described how young women were absolutely unwilling to be positioned like they were giving birth during the tests and said that the procedure was often perceived as torture by them.

Findings of the research were published a week before an international conference on medical practices within Indonesia’s military was organized in Bali last month. Human Rights Watch had been consistently lobbying to seek support from the countries that participated in the conference, including the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, so together they could pressure Indonesia into banning the offensive virginity tests.

In February this year, a district in Java was forced to scrap plans to conduct virginity tests for high school students in order to let them graduate after the regressive proposal sparked massive public outcry among Indonesians. A certain Member of Parliament, Ayub Junaidi, had put forward the regulation on ‘good conduct’ that included female students having to pass a virginity test even before they complete high school. He said of his proposal that the test would help tackle the growing problem of premarital sex in a conservative country like Indonesia, which not only happens to have the world’s largest Muslim population but also has a society that continues to hold women’s virginity in high regard.

However, human rights groups as well as Islamic leaders objected to the proposal, reacting furiously and ordering government officials in Jember to distance themselves from the plan. Kusen Andalas, deputy head of the district, clarified later that the proposal had in fact been quashed.

“I don’t think it is ethical to carry out such tests, it is against people’s rights,” he said.

Phelim Kine, deputy director for Human Rights Watch, Asia, decried the proposal as appalling.

“The Indonesian government’s tolerance for this violence against women and girls needs to end,” he said.

In 2013, the education chief of a city in Western Sumatra, too sparked outrage by proposing that teenage students should be forced to undergo virginity tests before they are allowed to enter high school.

Photo Credits: Al Jazeera