Campuses Are Not Safe Spaces, and We Have Pretended Otherwise for Too Long
I do not know where to begin. Perhaps from the group chat. Perhaps from the song. Perhaps from the fact that everything exploded in the same week — across several leading state universities at once — as if someone had opened a tap and all the filth that had been held back finally gushed out.
That April of 2026 felt like a slap in the face. At a state university’s law faculty, over a dozen students were deactivated because of a group chat containing degrading comments about women — which reportedly began as casual conversation among boarding house residents. At another campus, an old video resurfaced of students from a departmental association singing a song with vulgar lyrics about women. And at a renowned agricultural university, more than a dozen students were suspended over harassment in a private group that had been ongoing since 2024 — two full years before the victims finally reported it.
Two years. Imagine bearing that alone for two years. Imagine going to the same campus every morning, sitting in the same classes, perhaps passing the same people — and choosing silence not because nothing happened, but because you did not know if anyone would believe you.
What keeps me awake is not just the content of the cases. It is the fact that these are not a handful of unlucky campuses. These are the campuses that are being honest — while thousands of others are still tightly shutting their doors.
The numbers have been there, and they have been there for a long time. Komnas Perempuan Commissioner Alimatul Qibtiyah once stated that a survey of 661 campuses in Indonesia recorded 1,133 cases of sexual violence — 94 per cent of the victims were women. Those are the reported figures. Meanwhile, data from the same institution indicates that 80 per cent of sexual violence victims choose to remain silent. This means what we are seeing today — which already feels overwhelming and shocking — is only one-fifth of what is actually happening.
The Minister of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection also confirmed that 27 per cent of all sexual violence in educational settings occurs in higher education. Not in primary schools. Not in junior high schools. In the very places we send our best young people to grow into better human beings.
Every time a case like this goes viral, a question always arises, tinged with suspicion: ‘Why only report it now? Why not back then?’ I want to answer that question seriously.
Psychologist Diana Elliott, in her research on sexual violence survivors, found that more than half of respondents delayed disclosure for more than ten years. In psychology, this is called delayed disclosure — and it has been studied for decades as a deeply human response to trauma. Victims do not report immediately not because nothing happened, but because they need to gather courage, find enough safety, and believe that someone will believe them. One of the cases that sparked widespread discussion occurred in 2024 and was only reported in April 2026. Not because the victim was slow — but because it took two years to feel that their voice would not be ignored.
Sociology also has a name for the environment that creates such pressure. John Darley and Bibb Latané have been studying it since 1968 through the concept of the bystander effect — a phenomenon where people do not act not because they do not know something is wrong, but because each assumes someone else will act first. On campus, this mechanism meets what social scientists call a culture of silence: fear of grades being affected, fear of ostracism, and — most rarely mentioned — fear that the institution’s reputation is considered more important than justice for the victim. Silence is not the absence of a stance. Silence is a stance that chooses the perpetrator.
We have the regulations. Permendikbud No. 30 of 2021 on PPKS gives campuses a firm legal footing — form a task force, protect victims, process reports transparently, impose graduated sanctions. This is reinforced by Law No. 12 of 2022 on the Crime of Sexual Violence, and further expanded by Permendikbudristek No. 55 of 2024, which broadens the scope to include bullying and intolerance. On paper, the legal framework is sufficient. The problem is not a lack of rules — it is the will to enforce them.
A Komnas Perempuan survey of PPKPT task forces across Indonesia found that only 53 per cent received active support from campus leadership. Another 23 per cent complained of minimal support. Nearly a quarter of task forces operate in a state of semi-paralysis by their own institutions — tasked with protecting victims under the same roof as those who prioritise keeping the campus’s reputation spotless.
The question is no longer whether we have rules, but who dares to enforce them. The PPKS task force must not be structurally dependent on the rector who appoints it — because such a conflict of interest cannot be resolved by good intentions alone. There needs to be a truly independent reporting channel, directly to the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology or Komnas Perempuan, without having to pass through an internal bureaucracy that can at any moment choose to protect the campus’s name.
Sanction standards also need to be uniform and nationally binding. If at one campus harassment results in nothing more than a written reprimand while at another it leads to expulsion, the public has the right to ask: does justice in this country depend on how famous the campus where the incident took place is?
And the most fundamental thing, yet the most often skipped: education about consent and relationship boundaries must be part of new student orientation — not as a one-hour lecture that is immediately forgotten, but as part of shaping a way of thinking from day one. Many perpetrators do not feel guilty because they were never taught that even a comment in a group chat can constitute sexual violence. This is not a defence of them — it is an indictment of a system that allowed them to grow up without ever being told where the boundaries lie.