Abstract

We examine the potential effects of COVID-19 on district government revenues, district and household spending, and ultimately local public service access. We find that the government forecasted decrease in economic growth and knock-on effects on central government budget revenues might lead to a 5.5 per cent decline in district intergovernmental transfer revenue, a 6.0 per cent decrease in district spending and a 7.5 per cent decrease in household spending. We estimate that the combined downturn in district and household expenditure would result in a 2 percentage point reduction in household access to local services from the projected baseline, a modest impact. We conclude that while COVID-19 may have a significant negative impact on local public services it will likely not derive from districts’ reduced access to funding or lower household spending. Central government has already organised a program of conditional cash transfers to needy households and this may help dilute any negative service effects related to declining household expenditure. Some observers have argued for a large increase in intergovernmental grants to combat the adverse effects of falling district spending. We do not advocate this approach, given the longstanding ineffectiveness of districts in using their considerable fiscal resources to enhance local service delivery.

Introduction

COVID-19 continues to have severe negative health and economic impacts across the vast majority of countries in the world. Indonesia has not escaped these destructive effects. As of this writing, Indonesia has experienced 320,000 cases of COVID-19 and 11,500 related deaths. Many observers believe these figures significantly underestimate the reality. Indonesia has not yet managed to ‘flatten the curve’ and COVID-19 cases and associated deaths are increasing at a rapid rate. COVID-19 is expected to have a large negative effect on economic growth in 2020 and possibly beyond into 2021. The Ministry of Finance estimates that the economic growth rate in 2020 may drop to between 2.3 per cent and −0.4 per cent from about 5.0 per cent in 2019.

COVID-19 will also likely have a substantial negative impact on local public service delivery, especially in the education, health, and water and sanitation sectors. Hard data are difficult to come by at this stage, of course, but anecdotal evidence confirms the expected adverse effects.

Introduction

In the midst of growing attention to and concern about gender based violence (GBV) in universities, a key piece in the jigsaw of responses to GBV are student activists who resist GBV and supporting cultures. This activism has attracted criticism from some quarters which caricatures students as delicate, precious and easily offended, resorting to silencing those they deem to cause offence, thereby threatening freedom of speech. In this environment where voicing resistance, silencing, and freedom of speech are coexisting realities, this chapter explores how feminist communities help young feminists to find their voice to say the unsayable and to speak out about GBV.

Universities, gender based violence and feminist activism

As established elsewhere in this book, GBV in universities has emerged as a social, policy and scholarly concern in the UK significantly later than in some other parts of the world. The advantage of this delayed attention is that we can learn from developments elsewhere. For example, while Title IX in the US may seem to provide a legal framework of accountability that UK activists can only dream of, recent commentaries identify the limitations of this approach (Harris and Linder, 2017; Marine and Nicolazzo, 2017). These include the mechanistic way that Title IX has come to be used in the context of campus GBV, by universities driven more by the desire to protect their status and reputation than their students. These mechanistic approaches are symptomatic of an ‘audit culture’ or ‘compliance culture’ which prioritises procedures and processes (have staff completed their allotted tasks?) rather than outcomes (are students safe?), and is characteristic of the galloping neoliberal encroachment of universities. Although universities are protected from some aspects of wider economic forces (for example, in the UK universities have not been as devastated by ‘austerity measures’ as have most other public sector bodies), they are by no means immune to neoliberalism's tentacles (McRobbie, 2009; Martínez-Alemán, 2014; Phipps and Young, 2015; Gill and Donaghue, 2016). The marketisation of universities and commodification of degrees come together with the deadening hand of audit cultures to interpret legislation such as Title IX in ways that arguably subvert its progressive potential.

In the UK, we are at a pivotal moment regarding gender based violence (GBV) in universities. The preceding chapters reflect on lessons learned and directions for future approaches to tackling GBV. In this final chapter, we highlight the emerging key themes from the contributions to this volume and identify gaps and possibilities in current research and practice.

Exploring GBV as part of the continuum of violence

The chapters in this volume approach GBV as part of the continuum of violence (Kelly, 1988) that includes sexual violence and harassment, intimate partner violence, and homophobic and transphobic abuse. Rather than taking the narrower focus on sexual violence that some others adopt, especially in the US, our approach has been more broadly on the variety of forms of GBV. While focused examination of the particularities of specific forms of GBV has tremendous value for developing our understanding of the phenomenon and effective responses, it is vital we see these specific forms as part of the greater whole of the continuum of abuse that Kelly (1988) identified. Broader understanding of the various types of GBV as part of a continuum helps to highlight the connections between these different types of GBV, for example, advertising Freshers’ Weeks events in ways that sexually objectify and demean women helps create a culture whereby sexual assault is normalised and victim-blaming is commonplace. This broader perspective highlights the role of not only behaviours but also attitudes and cultural norms in scaffolding sexism and misogyny, as identified by Sundaram (Chapter One in this volume) in her analysis of young people's conceptualisations of violence which lead to its toleration, normalisation and trivialisation. Understanding the attitudes and norms that underpin GBV helps recognise that interventions need to target a range of behaviours, attitudes and cultural norms; interventions such as The Intervention Initiative (Fenton and Mott's chapter), Stand Together (Jordan et al's chapter) and Get Savi (Hutchinson's chapter) recognise the continuum and the connections between different manifestations of GBV.

However, some of the contributions to this book have tended to focus on sexual violence, sexual harassment and the ‘wallpaper of sexism’ (Lewis et al, 2015) in the context of the renewed interest in ‘lad culture’, rather than, for example, intimate partner violence or homophobic and transphobic abuse, both of which warrant further scholarly and policy attention.

This collection comes in the midst of some promising and challenging times for activists, students and academics in the UK and beyond who have been researching and campaigning on the issue of gender based violence (GBV) in university communities. In the context of emerging research evidence and in the face of increasing public awareness of and media attention on this problem, these are indeed the first steps towards acknowledging and addressing it in countries including the UK and Australia. This chapter explores the context and contours of some of the recent and emerging debates on GBV in university communities within which this collection is located.

We understand GBV as behaviour or attitudes underpinned by inequitable power relations that hurt, threaten or undermine people because of their (perceived) gender or sexuality. This definition recognises that GBV is influenced by and influences gender relations and problematises violence premised on hierarchical constructions of gender and sexuality. Women and girls constitute the vast majority of victims of GBV, and men the overwhelming majority of perpetrators (Watts and Zimmerman, 2002; Hester, 2009). GBV includes a continuum of behaviours and attitudes such as domestic violence, sexual violence, sexist harassment on the streets, trans/homophobic expressions and behaviours, and expressions on social media which normalise sexism and sexual objectification. These expressions and behaviours are connected through what Kelly (1988) described as a continuum of incidents and experiences. The continuum of incidents (Kelly, 1988, 1989) refers to the conceptual connections between acts that constitute the wallpaper of violations – the behaviours and expressions so commonplace that they often recede into the minutiae of everyday life – and the less common ‘sledgehammer’ events (Stanko, 1985) that are more widely recognised as harm, which are both underpinned by and reinforce gendered power hierarchies. The everyday expressions and behaviours scaffold a culture of gender inequalities that sustains and enables the rarer acts. The associated concept of a continuum of experiences (Kelly, 1988) captures the subjective perceptions and the commonalities in how women and sexual minorities experience these expressions and behaviours as violations. Hence this conceptualisation suggests that we cannot address one end of the continuum – for example, rape and domestic homicide – without problematising the everyday manifestations of sexism and gendered hierarchies (Bates, 2014).