Minister against change of family concept
JAKARTA (JP): Minister of Population Haryono Suyono bristled at recent suggestions that the concept of "family" be extended to accommodate other types of relationships, including homosexuals.
The suggestions were explicitly made by activists of non- governmental organizations (NGOs) and women's groups during the recent Second Asia-Pacific Ministerial Meeting on Women in Development here.
The activists are said to have planned to bring the notion, through lobbying with country delegates, to the International Conference on Population Development scheduled for September in Cairo, Egypt.
"They want gay relationships and non-married couples to also be called families...but we'll do everything to ensure that only `proper' family structure be maintained," Haryono asserted when he closed the congress of the Indonesian Family Planning Association in Semarang earlier this month.
Haryono took the issue, which was pursued by the activists in the name of human rights protection, very seriously. He said he planned to garner support for his crusade from some friendly countries, both developing and industrialized, which he will invite here for a meeting on population in August.
"We pledge that we will ask the world to keep on respecting the existing values of family," he said. "Even if we have to use the language of Tarzan, we'll still do everything to make sure that the other countries understand our stance."
He also reminded that the 1992 Indonesian law on the development of population and prosperous families recognized only married couples with or without children, a father and child/children, or a mother and child/children.
During the June 4-17 Asia-Pacific Conference on Women here, a preparatory meeting for the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, the association of women's groups who called themselves the Asia Pacific Women's Action Network lobbied many parties to have their suggestion accepted.
They asked, for instance, that the official documents at the conference acknowledge that "lesbians face systematic physical and psychological violence from family, society and state institutions."
Changes
The women's groups also insisted that "lesbian relationships be accorded recognition under the law" and that "denial of such recognition is a violation of human rights."
Haryono's anger and the fact that the conference eventually rejected the groups' calls for recognition of lesbian relationships notwithstanding, there is no denying that even Indonesian society is undergoing substantial cultural changes.
Despite claims that the nation is faithful to its traditional family values, experts noted layers of the society which are surreptitiously discarding those very values.
"Yes, changes in the structure of family are already showing," Yaumil Agoes Achir, former Dean of the School of Psychology, University of Indonesia, and assistant to the Minister of Population, told The Jakarta Post.
Examples of the ongoing trend are not hard to find. Ika (not her real name), a woman in her early 30s and famous as both a singer and executive of a private corporation, is only one.
The much-publicized woman can't seem to settle down and marry. Instead, to appease her "need to nurture", she "adopts", though not in a legal sense, an orphan. To her, she is already a mother.
Famous actress Dorce Gamalama, who underwent a sex-change operation several years ago, adopted several children which received no protest from the usually-sensitive public.
Famous, single male hairdresser, Hanky Tandayu publicly adopted a boy, without so much as a whisper from the public as to what psychological impacts such an arrangement would have on the "son."
Prominent researcher from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) Dewi Fortuna Anwar also detects the change. More "conventional" changes like the fact that more women are entering the work force have affected the structure or at least values that families traditionally held, she said.
However, she is convinced that other, more drastic, changes are also occurring. Many women, especially those who are highly educated or have advanced their careers, have seriously considered the option of living with a man out of wedlock, she said.
Not to be overlooked are women who choose to stay single because they are more "confident" and would not accept men who cannot live up to their standards, Anwar said.
"Many women are now more confident of their ability to be financially self-supportive that they can be more `choosy'," she told the Post.
In short, options which less than two decades ago were not even considered as alternatives are now being chosen.
Demographic
Agoes Achir agreed that changes are taking place, although she considered them to be more demographic progress instead of cultural. The increase in life expectancy to 64 years and the fact that women outlive men mean that in the coming years there will be more female-headed households, she said.
Increasingly high divorce rates also contribute to the growing number of single parents, she said.
As for the "radical", cultural changes of the concept of family, Achir is optimistic that their speed is not yet "alarming".
She cited a number of sociology postulates which show that families, as a subsystem of society, have natural mechanisms to defend and maintain their identity even in the face of rapid societal changes.
"We know that there will always be people who are so rational that they decide whether or not to get married based on calculations as to which one benefits them the most," she said. "However, I believe that many of those confident, independent women still favor the institution of marriage over single life," she said.
Despite her conviction that marriage and families will prevail, Achir reminded that the rapid social, cultural changes mean more efforts are needed to maintain the traditional values and concept of family.
Achir believes it is fitting to remember those values on this National Family Day, a day which is being remembered as the date when in 1949 Indonesian families became reunited after being separated by the war for independence. (swe)