Pandemic and Stigma COVID-19 in Indonesia

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.210125.032How to use a DOI?

Keywords

stigma, discrimination, COVID-19, health workers

Abstract

The pandemic of COVID-19 destabilizes contemporary social relations. It has many impacts and one of them is a stigma against the infected persons. Stigma usually pictures discriminate behavior toward victims of some diseases such as leprosy or HIV-AIDS and also marginalized groups such as class, age, gender. Most victims of stigma are individuals and communities or nations perceived as lower class than the rest of the population. On the contrary, the pandemic of COVID-19 shows different discrimination as it stigmatizes behavior toward most of the infected people including the well-off people, who struggle toward the virus, more especially doctors, nurses, and other medical assistants. By using personal experiences as a family with COVID-19 and the existing publications including media that cover the issue of the stigma, this article discusses the disrupted social relationships. Stigma emerged particularly in the process of burying the corpse of COVID-19 infected persons where some people of the local communities refuse the corpse to be buried in their area. In an extreme case, some people even dig out the dead bodies. These facts blow social relationships that doctors and other health assistants who are usually categorized as honored persons and in which our culture gives them homage to corpses as something should be treated respectfully. Individuals and communities’ members fight to erase the stigmas at the national, and local levels. Governments at the national and local levels have to renovate hotels and other facilitates to give save houses for the infected COVID-19 as quarantine places.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Widjajanti M Santoso
AU  - Sri Sunarti Purwaningsih
AU  - Nina Widyawati
AU  - Ade Latifa
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/01/26
TI  - Pandemic and Stigma COVID-19 in Indonesia
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Science, Political Science, and Humanities (ICoSPOLHUM 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 188
EP  - 193
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210125.032
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.210125.032
ID  - Santoso2021
ER  -