Sri Marpinjun, Nindyah Rengganis, Yudha Andri Riyanto, and Fransisca Yuni Dhamayanti
The Early Childhood Care and Development Resource Centre (ECCD RC) was co-founded by Lembaga Studi dan Pengembangan Perempuan dan Anak (Institute for Women’s and Children’s Studies and Development; LSPPA), an organisation formed in 1991 in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, to introduce women’s and children’s rights to the people. The founders of LSPPA were university students whose research indicated that most citizens did not know about gender issues, gender equality perspectives and analysis, and the laws which support women’s rights. While the National Constitution (UUD 45) and some Acts of Parliament were progressive in that they followed UN conventions on human rights, women’s rights and children’s rights, in practice women and children were still in trouble. For instance, child marriage and maternal mortality remained issues in the country. Many Indonesians did not understand the concept of ‘rights’, and the problems facing women and children were not viewed as abuses of the rights of women and children.
As a result, LSPPA’s main programme in the 1990s was to disseminate information and stimulate discussions about gender inequality in the Indonesian context. The organisation hosted public discussions and seminars, published scholarly books and engaged in economic empowerment activities with poor women in rural areas. It also joined the local and national chapters of the Alliance in Gender Equality to support policy and regulation changes.
After seven years spent focusing on gender inequality issues with citizens, we found that our strategies were not very effective. We expected positive responses from the audiences in every forum we organised. What we got was resistance. We understood that adults would not change the attitudes, ideas and practices that they had believed in since they were young. They thought that gender and feminism were alien to our culture and should be rejected. They argued that our culture was fine in terms of gender equality. The rejections also included threatening phone calls: callers said they would kill LSPPA’s leaders and burn our office. We were exhausted mentally, and we felt that we were not achieving our goals because the resistance of those whom we were targetting for change was too strong. Also, other women’s organisations were offering similar programmes, so we thought that as feminist activists we could combine our efforts towards achieving social justice.
These factors led us to develop new strategies. In 1998, we launched our programme to influence the early childhood education system. Our focus did not actually move away from women’s issues; we remained committed to promoting gender equality in and through early childhood education. This change in our activities was based on our analysis that people learn to become a woman or man, and about gender roles, when they are very young. Early childhood care and development became LSPPA’s new brand.