JAKARTA: Human Rights Watch on Tuesday urged Indonesia’s national police to halt “discriminatory” virginity tests for women applying to join the force in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country.

The rights group said women applicants are required to be both unmarried and virgins, and the virginity test is still widely used despite the insistence of some senior police officials that the practice has been discontinued. In a series of interviews with HRW, young women — including some who underwent the test as recently as this year — described the procedure as painful and traumatic.

The women told how they were forced to strip naked before female medics gave them a “two-finger test” — a practice described by HRW as archaic and discredited.

“I don’t want to remember those bad experiences. It was humiliating,” said one 19-year-woman who took the test in the city of Pekanbaru, on western Sumatra island, and whose identity was not disclosed.

“Why should we take off our clothes in front of strangers? It is not necessary. I think it should be stopped”. Nisha Varia, associate women’s rights director at HRW, described the tests as “a discriminatory practice that harms and humiliates women”.

Police authorities in Jakarta need to immediately and unequivocally abolish the test, and then make certain that all police recruiting stations nationwide stop administering it.

Published in Dawn, November 19th, 2014