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n the last weeks the hashtag #nyalauntukyuyun (light for Yuyun) has spread widely on social media. It represents the public shock and anger over the gangrape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in a village in Bengkulu province, in western Indonesia.

Reports said she was attacked and gangraped by 14 men and boys on her way home from school on April 2. The rapists, aged from 16 to 23, later decided to dump her lifeless body. Bruised and beaten, her body was found two days later by villagers.

As a mother of a young girl, I still shiver every time I think of Yuyun. Her torturous experience is beyond imagination.

Many of us have expressed our outrage. Yet feelings of fear and helplessness inevitably creep in. We’ve had our hearts and our trust in humanity crushed far too often. Despite our collective responses and efforts, sexual crimes against boys and girls continue to happen.

We seem to run in the same circles. We blame everything else other than our own failure in providing for the ultimate safety of our minors.

Alcohol is instantly blamed. The Jakarta legislator Fahira Idris, for example, has demanded a total ban on liquor; others blame the internet and uncontrolled spread of porn.

Sadly, some who call for a strict control over internet porn are sometimes the same people who enjoy daily doses of TV junk, where females are represented as sexualized characters.

While the perpetrators in the Bengkulu case had reportedly drunk alcohol and watched porn, screaming for a total ban on alcohol and internet porn simply show our ignorance and failure to come up with a substantial approach to prevent such crimes.

Raising these issues is possibly a lot easier than having to face the root of the problem — which would force us to point right to ourselves.

Did the crime occur during school hours? Where were the parents or guardians of the under-age rapists? Why did our supposedly collective pride and strong sense of communality fail to prevent such a horrible crime, which took place around a neighborhood in broad daylight?

On the other hand, the reports reflect the ugly side of poverty, in which entertainment for young men and boys with nothing better to do often includes consumption of cheap liquor, massively available and unchecked in rural areas.

Then what do we have left?

We resort to the family, the neighborhood and community, including schools, to provide safe environment for our children. It is our responsibility to educate children about safety and how to assess their common sense for self-protection.

Arranging children to walk in groups to and from school may save lives. So might encouraging children to learn to sense and trust their intuitive fears.

Enforcing neighborhood watches may effectively alert people of any suspicious behavior and prevent real danger. Schools have to implement stricter rules to make sure that students do not wander around outside during school hours.

All these efforts may seem trivial. But that is exactly what we commonly lack in dealing with safety: common sense. We are probably too afraid of being misjudged for “victim blaming” if we shift our obsession over punishing the rapists into precautionary efforts such as teaching principles of safety to our children.

While we cross our fingers for all the big changes that should be made by authorities, at the grass roots we need to turn our reactive obsession over law and legislation into more practicable efforts that can help our children to develop a sense of safety.

To be able to do this, we have to firstly accept that part of the blame is ours. Beyond our deepest empathy, the “light for Yuyun” should force us to admit and learn hard from the undeniably lowest point of our ignorance as a community, of what is within our reach to keep our children safe.
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The writer is a lecturer in Translation and Cultural Studies at Jambi University