Beyond Privatized Obligation: Reconstructing State-Guaranteed Post-Divorce Child Support Protection in Indonesia

Abstrak

This study examines the failure of the privatistic paradigm in Indonesian Islamic family law to secure post-divorce child maintenance. While existing scholarship has largely emphasized paternal responsibility and judicial recognition of maintenance duties, insufficient attention has been given to the institutional failure that prevents court decisions from becoming enforceable protection for children. Using normative legal research with statutory, conceptual, case, and comparative approaches, this article analyzes Indonesian legislation, Religious Court decisions, Supreme Court policies, and Malaysia’s more institutionalized child support enforcement model. The study finds that Indonesia’s current framework provides strong normative recognition but weak execution, leaving children’s economic rights dependent on voluntary paternal compliance and costly civil enforcement procedures. Its main contribution lies in proposing a state-guaranteed layered responsibility model that integrates private obligation, judicial supervision, automatic income withholding, digital payment monitoring, temporary public guarantee funds, and specialized administrative enforcement. The article recommends the development of practical child support enforcement policy within Indonesia’s Religious Court system