Sexual Violence and Normalised Power Relations
The surge in sexual violence cases throughout 2026 is not merely a rise in statistics, but a mirror of our collective failure to dismantle long-normalised cultural roots.
From a contemporary criminological perspective, this phenomenon does not stand alone, but is intertwined with social structures, power relations, and everyday practices that seem trivial yet have systemic impacts.
We are facing a deeply rooted social crisis, not just individual deviance.
The Rape Culture Pyramid framework helps explain that sexual violence does not emerge from a vacuum.
It grows from the bottommost layer of practices considered “light”, such as sexist jokes, body comments, and objectification.
This layer forms the foundation that strengthens the legitimacy of more serious actions above it, including harassment up to rape.
The case involving 16 students from the Faculty of Law at Universitas Indonesia serves as a concrete illustration of how digital-based sexual violence develops in spaces considered private, such as WhatsApp groups.
This shows that digital spaces have become a new arena for reproducing sexual violence.
From a social pathology perspective, such behaviour reflects a dysfunction in norms within the academic community.
Campuses, which should be intellectual spaces, instead reproduce a culture of objectification.
When law students, who ought to understand norms, become perpetrators, the problem is no longer with individuals, but with the culture that permits it to happen.
Objectification of women’s bodies is a form of dehumanisation. When someone is reduced to merely a sexual object, moral boundaries against violence become blurred.
Comments on private body parts are not humour, but a form of symbolic domination that reinforces unequal power relations between perpetrator and victim.
Sexual fantasies, within certain limits, are a personal domain. However, when those fantasies are expressed without consent, especially in public or semi-public spaces, they transform into aggressive acts.