Alleged rape victims violated again by media

Sunday, November 23, 2003
Hera Diani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Teen soap opera actor Faisal strutted and posed confidently for the cameras, making light of rape allegations lodged by an 18-year-old ex-girlfriend.

"She's the one who forced me into sexual intercourse... Even if I did rape (a woman), why wouldn't I have picked a beautiful one?" the 19 year old said.

While the United States is gripped by the trial of basketball star Kobe Bryant for allegedly raping a young woman, local media has been whipped up into a frenzy about Faisal and his accuser.

Celebrity gossip tabloids and TV shows have been vying to land the latest scoop about the allegations, trundling out the young star's mother, his coworkers and fans to protest his innocence.

While the onus is on the woman to prove her allegations in court, she is also called on to justify herself in the court of public opinion, presided over by a skeptical tabloid media, in which concerns for privacy are judged inconsequential.

The past sexual history of Faisal's accuser has been dredged up, and she has been described as promiscuous. One TV gossip show interviewed a former boyfriend who alleged he had sex with the woman, and showed his home movie of her joking around for the camera.

"Well, if her allegation is true, then why isn't she brave enough to show her face?" sniffed one TV presenter after a camera crew came up empty-handed after camping out at the woman's home.

The dissection of the woman's background and personality is eerily similar to the Bryant case, where the young woman's history of emotional problems has been served up for public consumption and an old high school prom picture, showing her saucily lifting her skirt, has been published.

Of course, rape is a serious and damning allegation, but the media seems star-struck in reporting about Faisal, who has been declared a suspect but argues that he had consensual sex with the woman.

Faisal has told his side of the story to the tabloids; in return, they have waxed on about his youthful handsomeness, his thick eyebrows and beautiful aquiline nose, and pointed out that he has always played the good boy in TV series.

The inference is that the young woman -- loose and no great beauty -- must have concocted the rape allegation out of jealousy, a desire to grab some of the celebrity spotlight.

"That is so sexist. Pretty or not, anyone can become a rape victim," said woman's rights activist and legal expert Nursyahbani Katjasungkana.

Media observer Veven S.P. Wardhana said that local media still cannot position itself as a sympathetic but objective party in its treatment of alleged rape victims.

"They always focus on the physical description of the victims, like having fair skin and all. That's irrelevant. It's almost saying that because of her fair skin, she deserves to be raped," Veven said.

Biased coverage is also not exclusive to the scandal sheets, he added, noting that it is also done by mainstream publications and women's magazines.

"A women's tabloid once even published a picture of a child who was raped. Imagine the girl's pain and embarrassment. Women's publications are supposedly more sensitive, but the facts prove otherwise," he said.

Nursyahbani said local journalists also lacked an understanding about the different forms that rape can take, aside from the standard definition of forced sexual intercourse.

"While there are others concepts, such as sexual intercourse without consent, oral sex. Maybe it's because in Bahasa Indonesia, the vocabulary and understanding is still limited. While in English there's rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment," she said.

Fed up by the media coverage, the mother of Faisal's accuser went to the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), seeking support for her daughter.

After the meeting on Nov. 6, the head of Komnas Perempuan's monitoring subcommission, Murniati, warned journalists to tone down their coverage.

"The press has to consider carefully the victim's psychological circumstances. Publicity can leave the victim more depressed," she said.

However, in what some found a strange position to take for an institution entrusted as a guardian of women's interests, the commission said it did not believe the complaint should have been brought to its attention.

As biased and sexist coverage can be considered violence against women, perhaps the institution best suited to handling such a dispute is the media governing body of the Press Council.

Unfortunately, the council itself has no rules about biased coverage in rape cases.
"There is no specific point about that in the journalistic code of ethics. It's just the question of appropriateness. It is the same as covering war victims -- we shouldn't expose pictures of the wounded," said council head Ikhlasul Amal.

Complaints can be addressed to the Council, who will later summon the media in question.

"They have to provide clarification, an apology or sanction the reporters. If they refuse, we will publish a press release about them. I think that will be embarrassing enough for the media," Ikhlasul said.

It's doubtful the offending media's embarrassment, if any, compares to the shame of those women brave enough to come forward to face their own trial by fire.

Labels: media, women's right

Posted by hera at 12:39 AM | Permalinks | Comments

Kimchi: Korea strives to keep tradition on the menu

Sunday, November 16, 2003
Hera Diani, The Jakarta Post, Seoul

A cloyingly sharp smell hung in the air at the aT Center's exhibition hall here, site of Kimchi Expo 2003 last week.
Rows and rows of stalls displaying Korea's famous fermented dish, made with a spice rack full of different ingredients, took up the two floors of the modern building.
The idea of putting on a six-day international exhibition honoring a pickled dish may raise eyebrows among some people, but not Koreans.
For them, kimchi is serious stuff, part and parcel of their culture, with old sayings such as, "A man can live without a wife but not without kimchi", and "as Korean as kimchi".
For more than 3,000 years, sour-spicy kimchi has been a revered staple of Korean cuisine. Even today you would be hard put to find a Korean house, apartment or monastery without pots of kimchi on the porch, balcony or the refrigerator.
On the Korean peninsula, kimchi is so pervasive that people compare it to life's essentials of air and water. There is even the Kimchi Field Museum in Seoul, satisfying the questions of those curious about where it came from and how it evolved.
Director of the Kimchi Research Institute Park Kun-Young said the food also had philosophical value in honoring ancestors in this Confucian society.
"Our ancestors were poor, and we have no natural resources. That was why they tried to find a way to preserve food in the winter," said Park, a professor at Pusan National University's Department of Food Science and Nutrition.
But globalization, with the inevitable mushrooming of fast-food restaurants around the world, has even affected venerable kimchi.
"Young children don't seem as fond of kimchi. We're afraid that as they avoid kimchi, the culture may deteriorate and disappear," said Kim Young-Mo of the chief committee of the Expo.
There has also been decrease in market demand, and the country's producers face tight competition from Japan and China.
These are the very reasons the country held the second annual Expo.
"Other objectives are to introduce kimchi to the world market, to reinvigorate the kimchi industry and to increase the domestic market," said Kim, adding that the total budget for the Expo was about US$80,000.
A total of 181 companies participated in the Expo. Of that number, only 50 companies were kimchi producers, with the rest including spice and ingredient makers, kimchi refrigerator, health food firms and others.
The committee put on a variety of programs for the Expo which started on Nov. 6, such as a kimchi making contest for foreigners, kimchi cooking contest and folk song contest.
Of course, children are a focus to ensure there will be kimchi lovers in the future, so the committee invited 10,000 kindergarten students to the event, with some of them getting to participate in a kimchi making program. There was also a kimchi writing competition for elementary school students.
"Through this Expo, we also hope to attract buyers from other countries to boost the local kimchi industry, which is still on a small scale," said Kim.
In the past, kimchi was made by housewives and as a cottage industry. It has only developed as an industry about 10 years ago, and now consists of some 600 producers all over the country. But only 30 to 40 percent of the producers are economically viable, with the rest barely keeping afloat.
Only 5 percent of the total companies have the resources to export.
"Many if not all Korean women know how to make kimchi. But modern, kitchen-less homes have led to more and more kimchi being bought from the store, because it's costly to make kimchi at home," Kim said.
The most recent data, from the year 2000, showed that 30 percent of kimchi consumption in Korea was store bought. The total volume of kimchi produced commercially is some 500,000 tons annually, or a 1 trillion won market, which include not only branded kimchi in fancy packaging, but also that in modest boxes sold in traditional markets.
In 1992, kimchi consumption per head was 34.9 kilograms while in 2001, it was 33.6 kilograms, with the local price per kilogram around 4,000 won ($3.50).
Kim said small decrease in market demand was small "yet we can feel it".
Income from exports has also decreased, from around $78 million in 2000 to $68 million a year later, before rebounding to $79 million in 2002.
Japan takes 94 percent of the kimchi exported from Korea, but that only accounts for 6 percent of the total amount consumed in the country, with the rest made locally or from China.
"As kimchi gains more scientific recognition, Japanese are growing to like it. And they now know more about the method to produce it," Kim said.
Korea also imports its national dish, with this year's figure of about 24,000 tons or some $10 million. Almost all (98 percent) imported kimchi is from China, a country blessed with abundant natural resources to make the dish.
Korea is now working on promoting the nutritional value of kimchi as a low-fat, low-calorie and healthy dish. When Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) broke out earlier this year, some swore by the medicinal properties of kimchi.
"We hope this exhibition can encourage producers to export, and influence the government in terms of making its export policy," Kim said.
Organizing an exhibition, he added, was an effective way to communicate with a large number of people.
"I do believe that after the SARS epidemic, the increasing interest in Korean singers and actors, Korea will be more familiar to people and interest in kimchi will increase, too," Kim said.
With about 100,000 visitors visiting the Expo, there is reason for his hope of keeping kimchi on the menu.
Yet it is the spirit of maintaining a tradition and upholding it, despite the onslaught of the golden arches and other mass culture, that is really admirable about Koreans and their kimchi.
We Indonesians should learn from it and never take acar/asinan (pickled vegetables and fruit) or other traditional food lightly anymore.

Labels: travel

Posted by hera at 2:18 AM | Permalinks | Comments

Women still battling to get ahead in workplace

Sunday, November 02, 2003
Hera Diani and Bruce Emond, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The glass ceiling has been cracked but it's still far from being shattered: Although the workplace is more gender-friendly than it once was, examples of women CEOs like president director of Indofood Eva Rianti Hutapea and PT IBM Indonesia's president Betti Setiastuti Alisjahbana are still relatively uncommon.
Women, many of them stuck in "traditional" jobs of the secretarial pool or as assistants, are still having to learn how to navigate their way through the "boys' club".
So when "Dita" heard that the only top woman manager in her office had been forced to resign, she sensed discrimination.
"They said she didn't perform well, which is questionable because professionally, she's a hard worker and very professional. Compared to her male counterparts, she was doing a better job.
"Maybe she was too tough at times and made some misjudgment sometimes, but who doesn't?" said the middle-management staff in a private company.
At the heart of her dismissal, she felt, was that the woman had been deemed too strident and supercritical for her colleagues, the archetypal "bitch". She wondered if a man acting the same way would be regarded as hard and demanding, but the reaction would be accepting ("he's a man, after all"), not condemning.
She points out that much of the criticism of women in the workplace is personal, based on how they look or dress, not about their competency for their job. If they do make it to the top, they are often dismissed as riding their family's coattails to the top, or sleeping their way there.
"Educated people tend to deny the occurrence of discrimination against women in the workplace. But the fact is that discrimination remains. Men still can't accept women as their leader, or being in a higher position than them," Dita asserted.
"If they (women) make it to the top, they are considered overly ambitious, a poor mother, that they must be a lesbian, whatever. Worse still, they are considered as having used their femininity to reach the position," Dita said.
According to Eileen Rachman, director of executive performance development firm Experd, the stigmatization of women using their sexuality to get ahead persists.
"It's not that easy to merely use sexuality to reach a high position. That's a myth. Women executives who I know really perform very well in their jobs," she told The Jakarta Post.
Sociologist and women's rights activist Mayling Oey-Gardiner said that men are still threatened by women reaching top positions.
"Quantity-wise, statistically there are still more men in the workplace. As top positions are limited, men feel threatened by women so they conspire against women," Mayling said.
Stereotyping women as "emotional" -- with the implicit understanding that this tag means she will be prone to fly off the handle, be irrational and find it difficult to remain impartial in her judgements -- is used to keep them out of managerial positions.
A similar reason is that women will not be able to meet their professional obligations because of family commitments.
Men may be the ones orchestrating the effort to keep "uppity" women in their "place", but other women sometimes become allies in tearing them down.
"There has been the growing belief that the ones who should be blamed are women. It's like the stereotype that women like to gossip, while men do it as well. But when men gossip, they call it business. It's unfair. Eventually, women also believe that it's true," Mayling said.
Meisye, a 36-year-old private company secretary, holds to the belief that women are more emotional, but that it should not fstop them from making their way up the corporate ladder.
"There is no denying that we are more emotional, but being a manager means controlling those emotions in the workplace," she said.
"There is nothing to stop women from doing that ... But, of course, people prefer to work with someone who is at least semi-competent and friendly over someone who is bright, highly competent but cannot mix well with them."
Such views irk "Ira", a 26-year-old media worker.
"Women aren't more emotional, that's used by men to keep us down," she said angrily. "I know many male managers who are just as emotional if not more so (than women colleagues), but it's not a trait that is ascribed to men."
The battle to have quotas established for women in the government unleashed its own hornet's net of controversy, with male legislators rejecting the measure as unnecessary.
After all, goes the facile argument, this country is led by a woman.
"Research shows that corruption will decline when more women are given such positions. Therefore, men feel threatened because they're afraid of losing their positions," Mayling said.
Eileen said there would be no opportunity for sexism when companies had clearly defined corporate culture and measurement of performance and competency.
However, policies in most companies, and also the law on labor, do not benefit women.
Working women are not considered the breadwinners, therefore, they are not given the family or dependent's allowance.
"I'm single, but I have my mother and my siblings as my dependents. However, the company won't consider that," said "Wati", a 40-something manager in a private company.
The labor law allows for women to take two days off every month when they menstruate. In most cases, however, women are reluctant to take it for fear of being called unprofessional.
Some women may strive to measure up to men in every way, afraid of being labeled with the "emotional" stereotype, but then running the risk of being called "masculine".
"For women, good is never enough as they have to be excellent to be recognized in the workplace," Dita's manager once said.
Perhaps she forgot to add that they also need to be careful of all the obstacles lying on that difficult road to success.

Labels: women's right

Posted by hera at 2:24 AM | Permalinks | Comments

Obin: Handmade gems, but don't use the 'e' word

Sunday, November 02, 2003
Hera Diani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

There is always a treat in store at the fashion shows of noted cloth designer Obin. Aside from the expected array of beautiful traditional cloth and the tasty spread of local cuisine served before the show, there is quirkiness and theatricality in the presentation.
Last week's show included child singer Tina Toon strutting down the 40-meter catwalk connecting two stages, doing her version of the "drilling" dance moves of popular singer Inul Daratista.
What distinguishes Obin's show from other "look-at-me" local fashion presentations is that the combined effect of a plump 10-year-old girl performing a very adult dance, the stage props and the models' theatrical moves never seemed forced or pretentious.
All of it came together to highlight the real star of the show -- the stunning cloth, all of which is handmade.
Derived from traditional sources, the cloths are woven, embroidered, stitched-dyed, tie-dyed, smocked and ripped, before Obin's BIN House turns them into excellent sets for women, men, bridal and kids.
The latter was the reason Tina was on stage in the first place.
"I want to reject the sense of wearing (traditional) cloth, that it's not merely for occasions like a wedding party. It doesn't mean that it's a drawback for us (to wear it), it aims at going back to our habitat, our culture," Obin, or Josephine Werratie Komara, told a media conference prior to the show.
In her own everyday wear of kebaya (traditional blouse) and kain (cloth wrap), the 48-year-old master of batik and other indigenous textiles said she felt offended when her compatriots called her style "ethnic".
"Ball gowns or tuxedo are considered classic, but why is the kebaya called ethnic? If foreigners call it ethnic, fine. But it's strange when Indonesians call it the same. Because this outfit is classical Indonesian," said Obin, who has been working with traditional cloth since 1975 and whose boutiques are found in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong and the Netherlands.
In a less colossal presentation than last year's, the show called Matahati (conscience) brought to the stage some 200 sets of clothes, made up of around 600 pieces of 300 different types of cloth.
If last year's collection consisted of stonewashed jeans, poncho blouses and bustiers aside from the mainstay kebaya, this year's women collection weighed in with a more elegant assortment.
It consisted of old-school kebaya, cheongsam and their modification, as well as contemporary gowns.
There were blouses inspired by the Balinese classical kebaya, while another derived from Javanese or even European style, with ruffles on the wrist and along the collar and front.
Obin also took some inspiration from Muslim dress, as well as more contemporary fashion applied in long tube dress, or evening gowns.
Some outfits followed the curve of women's bodies, but others were straight or even asymmetrical in cut. The motifs were stripes, geometrical, floral or plaid.
Obin and her main designer Cita never follow a particular fashion trend, as Obin said being fashionable was far more important than fashion.
"It will last longer," she said, emphasizing that all of the handmade designs were "made with heart, by workers that are more deserving of being called artisans."
All of the dresses were accompanied by shawls, which are modified from traditional batik to ikat weavings or jumputan dye. Some shawls were a combination of different techniques, looking like patchwork, drapery or even wool.
They all came rich in motifs, texture and colors, the latter earthy and natural -- bottle green, purple, brown, red and all -- and carefully and beautifully combined. A standout was a baby pink kebaya with aquamarine scarf, mixed with matching kain, for a very pretty effect.
As for the men's collection, the main inspiration was baju koko Muslim dress, with the modification in the details, such as the side pocket or the collar -- Chinese style or asymmetric.
"We also just come up with a new technique, making long trousers from handwoven cloth. After six years observation, only now have we succeeded in making creased and neat trousers," Obin said.
Although she has been producing wedding dresses for years, the show last week was the first to include a bridal sequence.
The collection comprises an all-white wedding dress, made up of different styles: Kebaya, cheongsam and Western-style wedding dress. There was also one design that was accompanied by a burqa-inspired veil, very elegant and beautiful.
The show also marked the launching of a kids and teens collection, ranging from two years to 17.
The children looked very cute in fluffy dresses, tunics, spaghetti strap dresses or even the kebaya and kain.
The latter idea, according to Obin, came as she found quality ready-to-wear children's collections expensive, although it is doubtful that her excellent designs will be cheaper.
The main purpose is to familiarize the younger generation with traditional cloth.
"Traditional cloth is very good in quality, very old and very rich. Parents will not have to worry that children will not be comfortable wearing it. All of my children have been wearing kain since an early age, it's fine," she said.
"Today's children won't be familiar with traditional cloth when they grow up. But it's not too late to introduce them to it now."

Labels: fashion

Posted by hera at 2:22 AM | Permalinks | Comments