Three stories from a bit over a year ago. Each one seems to
illustrate a slightly different facet of how the Indonesian bureaucracy
is trying to come to terms with the sexual revolution that is raging
through the country. The government sector shows an unhealthy
willingness to regulate this part of people’s lives.
First,
we have the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology,
which has been given the task of blocking all internet porn sites. They
claim to have blocked 90% of all porn sites from Indonesia servers, but
some of the most popular ones are still accessible. Now it seems they
intend to offer some kind of reward for people notifying them of porn
sites which they haven’t blocked yet. It all sounds a bit like King
Canute to me. There’s too much money in porn, and Indonesia is too big a
market for those dealing in porn to give up so easily. It might be
more effective if they gave some ground and just tried to control the
worst offenders, which seems to work reasonably well in the West.
Anyhow, there is a comment on that story which sums up the craziness of
it:
So lets get this straight, Porn is illegal in Indonesia. Ministry
of Communications is blocking all or at least 90% of porn sites on the
Internet but since it is failing he now wants people to actively look
for porn on the web and win a prize. So he wants kids and of course
adults, enticed by the prize, to break the law by looking for porn and
then turn themselves in? So now there is a competition to look for porn
on the web…. sort of defeats the whole point doesn’t it? -Enakajah
Next,
we have a 26 year old taekwando teacher who had sex with her 15 year
old female student. As so often happens, the victim is punished. The
girl was sent to an institution for ’sexual orientation’ classes.
Meanwhile, the paedophile teacher gets let off the hook. Nothing
surprising about that. The twist is, the teacher tracks the girl down
and breaks her out of protective custody. I don’t think the prison
break would have been as spectacular as I’d like to imagine it. It
probably involved less use of taekwando skills and more of money being
passed to a few strategically identified guards. Now the officials are
nonplussed, they are not sure what to do about the teacher’s actions,
whether they can prosecute her for it. Well, I have a suggestion – that
they throw her in jail for interfering with a minor and abusing her
position of trust. Of course that won’t happen as Indonesia doesn’t
seem to have an age of consent, or at least it isn’t applied.
Especially not in the case of people who call themselves imams and want
to interfere with 12 year olds.
Finally,
some common sense as the government overturned a judgement by a court
in the Sumatran province of Jambi that would force teenage school girls
to undertake a virginity test. What would posess lawmakers to come up
with such an idea? Do they have no empathy, or do they take some smutty
delight in such evil? Would they want to deny an education to girls
who had been abused at home?
A similar thing happened in Jakarta when it became public that street
children are often victims of sexual abuse. The police were proposing
to round them all up and have them examined for abuse. Fortunately that
scheme was eventually abandoned too.
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