Home, School, and Screens Are the Three Spaces That Shape Children's Behaviour
The phenomenon of violence committed by children against other children is no longer an incident that can be resolved with the word “sorry” and a handshake in the head teacher’s office. Violence has become a structural problem that touches three living spaces of a child at once: the home, the school, and the device screen that is always in their hands. Ironically, Indonesian law regulates these three spheres separately, as if the same child would never move from one space to another in a single day. This is what must become a matter of collective reflection.
Article 26 of Law Number 35 of 2014 concerning Amendments to Law Number 23 of 2002 on Child Protection affirms that parents are obliged to care for, nurture, educate, and protect their children, as well as to develop their personalities in accordance with their talents and interests. This provision is not merely a moral narrative, but a legal norm that certainly carries consequences.
When a child grows into someone who commits violence, the state must not only question the child; it is also obliged to ask to what extent the duty of care has been fulfilled in the domestic context by the parents.
The widespread problem today is that enforcement of this obligation can be said to be far from optimal. Sanctions for parents who neglect their caregiving duties are vaguely regulated and rarely applied consistently and firmly. This results in a gap between the norm on paper and practice on the ground.
The law demands that parents be held accountable, but it has not yet provided adequate monitoring or support mechanisms for families at risk of raising children with violence-tinged behaviour. The home, which is in fact extremely difficult to monitor, is the most decisive point.
Turning to the education sector, Regulation of the Minister of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology Number 46 of 2023 concerning the Prevention and Handling of Violence in Education Units has emerged as a fairly progressive legal instrument.
This regulation requires every education unit to form a Violence Prevention and Handling Team and establishes reporting mechanisms that should be able to break the chain of “neglect” of violent practices that have long become customary in many schools.
However, a ministerial regulation will only be firm and implementable if it is followed by strict supervision and real administrative sanctions for education units that are negligent in carrying out their duties. In fact, many schools choose the shortcut of covering up cases in order to protect the institution’s reputation, which is deeply troubling. The institution’s good name is prioritised over upholding justice.
Such conduct can be qualified as a form of “omission” and has the potential to entangle the school in legal responsibility, both administrative and, under certain conditions, criminal. Schools must no longer be treated as neutral spaces that merely receive the overflow of problems from home; schools are legal subjects that bear an active duty to prevent, not merely to handle cases after victims have fallen.
If the home and school already have legal frameworks, albeit weak in implementation, the digital space is still stumbling in its regulation. Law Number 27 of 2022 concerning Personal Data Protection has begun to touch upon the protection of children’s data as vulnerable subjects, and the Electronic Information and Transactions Law, as amended for the second time, provides room for action against content that exploits or facilitates cyberbullying.
However, both were designed with a primary orientation towards data protection and content enforcement, not towards preventing violent behaviour born from children’s daily digital consumption patterns.
This is where the most dangerous legal vacuum lies. Digital platform algorithms are designed to maximise a person’s—especially a child’s—exposure, not to protect a child’s psychological development. When a child watches violence as normalised entertainment, then brings it into the classroom as material for jokes or even actual practice, our law does not yet have a sufficiently sharp instrument to hold platform providers accountable for their contribution to shaping such behaviour. Because a child does not necessarily react immediately after consuming violent content; it takes an unpredictable period of exposure, yet it has an impact.
Child protection regulation in the digital space must no longer stop at data privacy matters; it must be expanded to touch upon platform responsibility for the psychosocial impact of their algorithmic design.
True restorative justice should demand cross-regulatory synergy: the obligations of parents under the Child Protection Law, the obligations of education units under Ministerial Regulation Number 46 of 2023, and the responsibility of the digital ecosystem within the framework of data protection and electronic information must be enforced simultaneously, not alternately.
As long as the state continues to handle the three separately, a child who repeatedly becomes a perpetrator of violence will merely move from one weak legal space to another weak legal space, potentially producing more victims. The child perpetrator never truly receives complete and comprehensive correction.
Violent behaviour in children is not born from a single cause, and therefore it must not be addressed with a single solution either. Home, school, and screen are three spaces that interlock in shaping a child’s character, and the laws governing the three must also interlock in their enforcement.
As long as child protection regulations continue to operate in silos, without a binding coordination mechanism between family, education units, and digital platforms, the cycle of violence will continue to reproduce itself.