Indonesian women's rights activists defend singer caught in grip of anti-pornography law
In Indonesia, making adult content for personal use could land you in jail. Just ask singer Gisella Anastasia, who has been named a suspect under the country's draconian anti-pornography law after an intimate video she made in 2017 recently went viral - after being taken from a mobile phone she had lost.
The 19-second video of Gisella and a man, who was later identified as Michael Yukinobu Defretes, was shared widely on Twitter on November 6.
Two days later, lawyer Pitra Romadoni Nasution reported the video to Jakarta police, asking them to investigate the content "to stop the distribution of porn on social media that has been viewed by millions of Indonesians".
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Gisella Anastasia in an undated picture. Photo: SCMP alt=Gisella Anastasia in an undated picture. Photo: SCMP
The police have accused two men of distributing the video online and have charged them for violating the information and electronic transaction law and anti-pornography law.
Gisella, the ex-wife of popular television personality Gading Marten, was also summoned twice for questioning and eventually named as a suspect on Tuesday along with Defretes. They have been charged under the anti-pornography law's controversial Articles 4 and 8 and face punishment of up to 12 years in prison.
Neither Gisella nor Defretes have been detained, however, and the police are still on the hunt for another suspect who allegedly first shared the video.
According to the police, Gisella, a former runner-up in the Indonesian Idol singing competition, admitted that the woman in the video was her, and that she had made the recording in a hotel in Medan, North Sumatra, in 2017. She also told the police that she had later lost her mobile phone.
"When asked why she recorded it, she said that it's for personal documentation, and that she would never resell it," Jakarta police spokesman Yusri Yunus said on Tuesday, as quoted by news portal Detik.
Women's rights activists and legal experts have condemned the prosecution of Gisella, pointing out that she is a victim in this case and should be protected by the state.
"The anti-pornography law should be amended, as this law was hastily passed and wasn't discussed in details with the public," Olin Monteiro, a women's rights activist and founder of Arts for Women, who had opposed the law before it was passed in 2008, told This Week in Asia.
"The law should not prosecute us because we make adult content for personal use. Laws like this are hurting women and other marginalised groups. Victims of revenge porn, for example, will be scared to report their cases to law enforcement."
The Jakarta-based Institute for Criminal Justice Reform pointed to an exception in Article 4 of the anti-pornography law that states the creators of personal, adult content cannot be criminalised. The article clashes with Article 8 of the same law, which states that Indonesians are barred from being a model or object in any pornographic content.
"Authorities must understand that if [Gisella and Defretes] do not want to share the video to the public or for commercial purposes, then they are victims that should be protected. The investigators must return their focus to investigating the perpetrators that shared the video with the public," the institute said in a statement.
Mariana Amirudin, commissioner at Indonesia's National Commission on Violence Against Women, said cases such as this highlighted the disenfranchisement of women in Indonesia's largely patriarchal society.
"In porn cases, women are more harmed than men as women's bodies are more [focused on] compared to men's, women are also often being made nude objects so it is easy for them to be a suspect in cases like this," Mariana said.
A group of plaintiffs in October filed for judicial review of the pornography law to the Constitutional Court, 10 years after a similar request was denied by the court after it found the plaintiffs did not have the requisite legal grounds.
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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