Legal Empowerment: Strengthening People’s Access To Justice

Legal empowerment is a crucial pathway to enhancing access to justice, dismantling structural inequalities, and overcoming development barriers in society. Therefore, IJRS, in collaboration with Yayasan PEKKA, has implemented legal empowerment activities aimed at enabling communities to understand the law and use it to protect their rights. These activities were carried out in Jangkar Village, Tanah Merah District, Bangkalan Regency, Madura Island.

Based on a legal needs assessment, the majority of the surveyed community members in Jangkar Village reported issues related to social security (53.3%), housing (33.3%), land and environment (23.3%), and family and child matters (20.0%). The assessment also highlighted community views on criminal acts such as sexual violence and child marriage, where 83.3% of respondents believed that victims of sexual violence should be allowed to marry their perpetrators. Additionally, 23.3% of the community still held the view that children could be married under the age of 19. In addition, the majority of respondents also perceive that legal issues are difficult to resolve (76.7%) and that legal assistance is not evenly distributed, making it difficult to access (73.3%). As a result, three main focus areas were identified for the legal empowerment activities:

1. Basic citizens’ rights, legal issues, and legal aid;
2. Gender, violence against women including sexual violence and domestic violence (DV);
3. Child marriage and its connection to sexual and reproductive health.

The publication of this book outlines the stages of conducting legal empowerment activities, beginning with the process of mapping legal needs, developing empowerment guidelines, and implementing and documenting legal empowerment activities. This aims to ensure comprehensive documentation, accountability in the process, and provide learning materials and references for future legal empowerment activities.

Download Book 2 – Legal Empowerment Guidelines: Capacity Building for Village Communities by Learning, Using and Socializing Law to Realize Access to Justice here