The government has failed to create a safe environment for all and a legal umbrella to protect citizens from sexual harassment. Efforts to pass a sexual violence bill are going back and forth, with conservatives claiming that the proposed law violates Islamic values.
ne day a fellow journalist asked me to stay over at his place where we could spend the night together and “chitchat”, an offer I politely rejected.
But he kept asking me the same thing over and over. Worst, he sent sexy pictures of some random girls to our chat room and asked things that made me uneasy.
I was so irritated that I ventured to speak up about my discomfort and told him to stop treating me that way. Luckily, he was willing to back off and altogether disappeared from my life.
I might be one of a handful of women who managed to escape such a frustrating situation by standing up to and rejecting such irritating treatment.
Some other women perhaps would not have had the guts to do the same if there were power relations involved, like between female subordinates and male bosses or between junior and senior coworkers. As a result, these women could — at the worst possible moment — fall victim to sexual harassment at the workplace.
One such unfortunate woman was Baiq Nuril Maknun, a 42-year-old former employee of a senior high school in West Nusa Tenggara (NTB), who repeatedly received lewd phone calls from the principal, and experienced a string of unpleasant incidents after exposing his harassment.
Instead of getting protection and justice from law enforcers, the mother of three appeared to be trapped through the Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law for defamation after the man, identified as Muslim, reported her for defaming him by distributing the call recording to others.
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