Virginity Test in Police Recruitment System: Evidence from Indonesia

It is difficult for women to become police officers in Indonesia. One of the mandatory requirements is to become a virgin. Women who are no longer virgins cannot pass the selection. However, if the woman's hymen is damaged not because of sexual intercourse but because of an accident, she still hopes to become a police officer. This study aims to examine the virgin criteria as a requirement to become a policewoman in Indonesia. This quantitative study examines the virginity for police admission based on virginity requirements from a human rights perspective and the concept of innocence. Inspired by the idea of purity from Hanne Blank that celibacy does not reflect a known biological necessity and provides no demonstrable evolutionary advantage. This article says that police virginity testing is not essential and makes up discrimination of women's opportunity to become a police officer because there is no correlation between virginity and police duty. This article evaluates this activity performed Indonesian police force from the lights of human rights. It criticizes the policy development specification of Indonesia which is even poor than India and Muslim countries as even in this country women empowerment is prioritized and respected. This country is needed to incorporate changes in this policy.

Traditional Practices and Human Rights: An Insight on a Traditional Practice in Inchanga Village of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa

After falling into absolute dereliction in the Zulu community, the traditional practice of virginity inspection made a retaliation some 10 years ago, after the country’s first democratic elections. This study investigates the perceptions and experiences of virginity inspection of female adolescents in Inchanga village, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. A focus group interview was conducted with 10 Zulu maidens for qualitative data collection. Proponents of virginity inspection believe that virginity inspection is a traditional practice that can assist in reducing HIV infection and teenage pregnancy among the youth, and in the detection of children who are sexually abused by adults. Opponents of virginity testing, such as several human rights groups in South Africa, as well as the South African Human Rights Commission of virginity inspection, strongly believe that the practice of virginity inspection interferes with human rights and constitutional prescripts that protect the rights to equality, privacy, bodily integrity, and sexual autonomy of young women. The study found that the participants have only positive experiences of the practice of virginity inspection, and the only negative experiences they encounter are negative responses from community members who do not support the practice. The findings also confirmed that virginity inspection is being done irrespective of different opinions from different scholars and experts on the subject, and most of the time, the age of the children is not considered.

Circularity

This chapter offer glimpses of how women appear in forensic medical descriptions as sexually deviant bodies—often disembodied, always empirically verifiable. It analyzes medico-legal accounts of abortion, descriptions that overlapped with the forensic assessment of rape, virginity testing, and infanticide. Different authorities, including coroners, medical doctors, policemen, state administrators, and social commentators, utilized a circular form of reasoning where anatomical description was united with a speculative sociology of Indian women's sexuality, and then read back onto the body to discern the meaning of the anatomical violence on the body. These case studies of the body utilized typological categories that link women's social status to their sexual behavior. Over the course of individual case studies, social typologies were read back onto parts of women's bodies to comprehend the meaning of physical evidence. This circularity appears in legal medicine as a natural form of reasoning: a logic that seamlessly united anatomical descriptions of sexualized bodies with the ethno-scientific assessment of social identity.

Virginity testing: recommendations for primary care physicians in Europe and North America

Virginity testing is a complex, culturally mediated practice that is poorly understood by Western clinicians. While advocating for global elimination of the practice of virginity testing as a human rights violation, clinical practice is often more complicated and ethically nuanced, and the clinician must act in the best interest of her patient. Upholding human rights does not have to be incompatible with providing a needed service to a patient, which should never include an invasive exam if not medically necessary, but should include education and safety assessments.