Legal Literacy - Recently, Indonesian society was shocked by a case of alleged sexual harassment involving several law faculty students where campuses are supposed to be safe and inclusive spaces for the entire academic community to learn and grow.

Screenshots of group chats circulating on the internet show that women, especially female students and lecturers, are treated as sexual objects, jokes, and topics of conversation without guilt. The phrases "silence means consent" and "principle of rape" appear as views that are not only morally wrong but also have no scientific basis. Perpetrators often use these narratives as a form of rationalization to justify their actions and assuage guilt, both in the eyes of the law and society.

There was also one message that expressed concern that if the conversation was leaked, their career could be ruined. This raises concerns that sexual abusers are aware of their behavior, but choose to continue doing so.

Normalizing Sexual Violence in Private Conversations

Conversations in private digital groups can contain various forms of speech that lead to the normalization of sexual violence. These include rape jokes, victim blaming, veiled threats, and objectification of women's bodies. Sexual jokes that are repeatedly told in private spaces are often considered "harmless jokes" by perpetrators, even though they fall under the category of non-physical sexual harassment as defined in Law Number 12 of 2022 on the Crime of Sexual Violence.

Sexualized comments, jokes that objectify women as sexual objects, and verbally abusive conversations are clear examples of non-physical sexual violence. In the context of group chats, even though they are considered private, such acts are still categorized as sexual violence due to their nature, namely, the content of conversations that demean, harass, and objectify women as sexual objects. Sexual harassment can occur in both open and closed digital chat rooms. Sexual harassment is the most basic act in the rape culture pyramid. Harassment that is disguised as a joke and normalized contributes to more severe sexual violence.

To understand why this phenomenon occurs, we need to examine how rape culture works as a gradual accumulation. Rape culture normalizes, ignores, and ultimately legitimizes sexual violence through a layered process.

The normalization layer forms the foundation through behaviors that are often considered trivial or commonplace in society, such as sexist jokes, catcalling, and sexual comments that are considered harmless. This layer then progresses to the degradation stage, where one's dignity and autonomy are openly attacked through victim blaming, revenge porn, and psychological coercion. All of these behaviors eventually culminate in a layer of direct violence involving acts such as rape, sexual harassment, and murder of women. Tolerance of these lower-layer behaviors supports and justifies the upper-layer behaviors.