Indonesia can order abuse images deleted. The victim still does the chasing

In April 2026, screenshots from a private group chat between 16 male law students at Universitas Indonesia went public: sexual jokes about female classmates and lecturers, and a line saying that silence means consent. The response was fast. Women students confronted the men at a faculty forum, the university suspended all 16, and the Indonesian Education Monitoring Network called for a state of emergency over violence in education. Writing for Fulcrum, the site run by Singapore's ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Nuurrianti Jalli uses the case to ask whether the law stops this kind of harm or only cleans up after it.

Indonesia does have a law. The Sexual Violence Crime Law, Law No. 12 of 2022, treats electronic-based sexual violence as a crime and lets victims demand that sexual images or descriptions of them be removed. A 2025 implementing regulation, the detailed rules that say how a law works in practice, sets out how to ask. Neighbours built other routes. Thailand made online sexual harassment a crime in December 2025 and added a fast court order that stops the sharing without waiting for a police investigation, while Singapore's Online Safety Commission can order platforms and group admins to disable content. All of these remedies begin only after the material has been made, found and reported.

Generative AI widens that gap. In early 2026 Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines all restricted Grok after it was used to produce sexual images of women and children without their consent. Users could get around a country block, and deleting one image does nothing to the tool that makes the next one. Jalli wants the rules to reach the systems behind the pictures: companies should have to test for risks to women before they launch a product, block the creation of sexual images of real people, keep evidence, and answer for how their recommendation feeds and advertising push this material. Australia and the European Union already regulate this way.

Why it matters

If this happens to you or to someone close to you, the law gives you a route but leaves you doing the work of finding, saving and reporting the content each time it reappears. Go to the campus or the workplace as well as the police, since in the Universitas Indonesia case the university acted first. The longer-term question is whether Jakarta starts putting duties on the platforms themselves, because rules that only bite after the fact mean one takedown just makes room for the next copy.