Legal avenues deemed insufficient to tackle child marriage and 'marriage by capture'

BANDUNG, Kompas.com - Former Commissioner of the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), Siti Aminah Tardi, highlighted the coercive practices of marriages against women in Indonesia, including child marriage and ‘kawin tangkap’ carried out in the name of culture. According to Siti, such coercive marriages provide evidence that a legal approach alone is not enough. ‘But socially it continues to occur. This means the legal approach is not enough. The legal approach is only a small part of efforts to resolve social problems,’ Siti said when she spoke at the Human Rights Journalists Class in Bandung, West Java, Thursday (21 May 2026). She argued that the phenomenon is one form of violence against women. ‘Kawin tangkap is carried out in the name of culture; women are taken away in a public place, brought to the man’s place, and then, in the name of culture, whether they like it or not, they are married,’ she said, also the Executive Director of the Indonesian Legal Resource Center (ILRC). One example is child marriage, which by law is categorised as a criminal act. Nevertheless, Siti assessed that enforcement of law alone is not enough to stop the practice because social and cultural factors in society are still strong. She said many parents still seek child marriages even though the state has raised the minimum marriage age to 19 through the revision of the Marriage Act. In practice, when a marriage dispensation application is denied by the court, some families choose to conduct marriages through adat (customary) or siri arrangements. ‘So child marriages still occur even though the state through regulations has prohibited child marriages, even prohibited raising the marriage age,’ she said. Siti noted that judges actually have procedures and special considerations in adjudicating applications for child-marriage dispensation. However, social realities make these practices continue. Therefore, she argued that solving the issues of child marriage and kawin tangkap cannot rely solely on legal approaches.