Legal Mobilisation by Indonesian Women with Disabilities in Pursuing Empowerment

Abstract

Women with disabilities have experienced double marginalisation. As women, they remain marginalised in terms of gender, such as patriarchal culture and religious conservatism, and as a person with disability, their participation in the social, political, economic and cultural lives has been constrained by the state and society’s barriers. One example can be seen from the lack of reliable statistics/data about women with disabilities in Indonesia. They remain treated as a separate entity by the state policies. This treatment, in turn, could not understand their experience of marginalisation as a unified human subject. Even though Indonesia has ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) through Law No 7 of 1984 and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) through Law No 19 of 2011, it has not changed much and the marginalisation continues to remain. Based on that, the problems addressed in this thesis are: first, the intersectional forms of social construction that are a serious problem for women with disabilities in which sexual and gender identity escalate the condition of women with disabilities; second, the legal and institutional settings in Indonesia positioning within different government institutions. By applying qualitative research methods through documentary research and semi-structured interviews, this research discusses the legal mobilisation by women with disabilities in Indonesia in order to pursue empowerment as well as their limitations. I divide their process of mobilising legal and institutional resources through three different strategies: advocacy from above, advocacy from within and advocacy from below. They achieved such meaningful goals in the normative context and empowering other women with disabilities; however, the challenges for further empowerment remain in place.

Implication of thesis: This research has two implications: firstly, the method will be useful for understanding how women with disabilities in Indonesia exercise their agency to mobilise legal and institutional resources in achieving empowerment. Secondly, it enriches the literature review of women with disabilities from gender and human rights approach.

Key words: Women with disabilities, legal mobilisation, empowerment, Indonesia