Enforcement of Interdisciplinary Divorce Readiness Assessments to Secure the Best Interests of the Child in Indonesian Jurisprudence

Abstract

Divorce in Indonesia is adjudicated primarily as a formal legal dispute between spouses, while the psychological, social, and developmental interests of children are often treated as peripheral consequences rather than as central objects of judicial consideration. Although the best interests of the child principle is expressly embedded in Indonesian family law and child protection legislation, judges continue to rely predominantly on adversarial civil evidence, leaving child welfare determinations insufficiently theorized and inconsistently enforced. This article examines how an Interdisciplinary Divorce Readiness Assessment, integrating psychological, sociological, and legal evaluations before and during divorce proceedings, can be constructed as a binding evidentiary mechanism within Indonesian civil procedure. It aims to reconceptualize divorce adjudication from a predominantly adversarial model toward a restorative paradigm and to design a mechanism through which interdisciplinary assessment recommendations can acquire meaningful probative weight before religious and general courts. The novelty of this study lies in adapting court-annexed, multidisciplinary assessment models drawn comparatively from Australian Child Impact Reports and the English Child Impact Assessment Framework into a doctrinally grounded Indonesian evidentiary framework anchored in Progressive Legal Theory and Rawlsian distributive justice. Employing a normative juridical methodology with statutory, conceptual, principle-based, and comparative approaches, the study finds that stronger procedural recognition of expert assessment, combined with a mandatory judicial consideration standard, can transform judicial reasoning into a more child-responsive and trauma-preventive process.