The Indonesian Army will stop subjecting female recruits to mandatory vaginal exams, the army chief said in an interview with local reporters this week. Rights groups have long viewed the procedure as a continuation of the invasive and discredited so-called virginity test that is slowly being stamped out in many places.

       In an interview on Tuesday, Gen. Andika Perkasa, the army chief, said there would be “no more vaginal and cervix examinations,” and that there would no longer be an assessment of whether women’s hymens were intact.

       His confirmation came less than a month after he hinted at the changes in a different statement, setting off celebrations among activists who have campaigned against the practice for years. They said they hoped the move would lead other branches of the Indonesian military to change the procedure.

       Latisha Rosabelle, 21, who grew up in Indonesia and started a petition against the practice that garnered nearly 70,000 signatures, said she was “stunned” when she heard the news. “I had been posting stuff online for years,” said Ms. Rosabelle, now a student at Smith College in Massachusetts. “It felt so slow. I was a little bit hopeless.”

       During the test, a doctor inserts two fingers into a woman’s vagina, based on the incorrect notion that it’s possible to determine in that way whether a woman has had sexual intercourse. Besides being based on misinformation — hymens break for a variety of reasons, and there is no physical way to know whether a person has had sex — the practice has been roundly condemned as a violation of human rights.

       “‘Virginity testing’ reinforces stereotyped notions of female sexuality and gender inequality,” the World Health Organization and two other arms of the United Nations said in a joint statement in 2018. “The examination can be painful, humiliating and traumatic. Given that these procedures are unnecessary and potentially harmful, it is unethical for doctors or other health providers to undertake them.”

       Andreas Harsono, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who has interviewed dozens of women subjected to the tests, said they described a traumatic experience, most often involving a male doctor and two nurses to hold the woman’s shoulders and legs. It has left many women traumatized and others reluctant to speak about it, he said.

       “It is sexual abuse,” he said. “It is sexual violence.”

       In a video posted last month, General Andika, the army chief, said there were health standards that recruits must meet, “but there are also things that are irrelevant. Unrelated. And it is no longer being examined.” He added that “we have to be consistent as well,” and that the selection process for men and women must be the same.

       It is still unclear when the change will go into effect, and a spokesman for the army did not respond to a request for comment.

       First Adm. Julius Widjojono, a spokesman for the Indonesian Navy, said, “It’s not virginity test, but we call it obstetrics and pregnancy test.” He said men and women were subjected to the same test, and then interviewed. “I call this battery test,” he said. “With these tests, we will know the complete condition of the navy officer candidate.”

       Indan Gilang Buldansyah, a spokesman for the air force, described its test as a “reproduction health test” for male and female recruits. For women in particular, he said, the test is meant to ensure that “the recruitment candidate will have no problem in her education and placement.” He said the discovery of a cyst could interfere with a woman’s education.

       Mr. Harsono said health concerns had historically been used in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, as a cover for carrying out so-called purity testing. Human Rights Watch investigated the practice in Indonesia in 2014; the Home Office, which hires civil servants, stopped using the procedure that year, and the police force did so in 2015, he said.

       The tests still happen in other countries. In January, a Pakistani court banned their use by the police in sexual assault cases, saying the procedure was “used to cast suspicion on the victim.” Afghanistan also banned the tests, without success.

       The American rapper T.I. prompted outrage in 2019 when he said he brought his teenage daughter to yearly appointments to make sure her hymen was intact. The comments spurred New York lawmakers to consider outlawing the practice.

       In Indonesia, many women have endured it.

       Faye Hasian Simanjuntak, 19, grew up being shuttled from one military base to another as the daughter of a military officer. As she got older, she became aware that women in the army and the wives of male soldiers were subjected to the procedure.

       “Just about every female I knew grew up with it,” she said. “You could safely assume all the women had gone through that.”

       After hearing reports that the army had decided to end the tests, Ms. Simanjuntak, a university student in Washington, D.C., and the founder of a nonprofit organization in Indonesia that fights child trafficking and abuse, said she became overwhelmed with emotion.

       “I was straight-up bawling,” she said in an interview.

       Ms. Simanjuntak said she expected there to be challenges with enforcement in a “culture where virginity is considered a gauge for women’s morality.” She added that “people in the past who defended the virginity test have to apologize.”

       “I don’t think a woman’s morality or worth should be dependent on her status as a virgin or not,” she said. “That said, when we discuss it, I don’t use that argument, because then it is an argument on morality.”

       Ms. Simanjuntak added, “The approach we use is simply: Virginity tests are not able to find out whether a woman is a virgin or not.” She said some of her friends who were subjected to the test struggled with it throughout their lives.

       “‘Scary.’ That is usually the word that they use,” she said. “They rarely like to talk about it.”