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Project Multatuli digitally attacked after reporting on police inaction in rape case

Hours after publishing a report on alleged police neglect in a South Sulawesi rape case, the website of public journalism initiative Project Multatuli suffered a DDoS attack.

Radhiyya Indra (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Thu, October 7, 2021

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Project Multatuli digitally attacked after reporting on police inaction in rape case Abandoned: An illustration of sexual abuse allegations in East Luwu, South Sulawesi. (Project Multatuli/Muhammad Nauval Firdaus - under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0 license) (Project Multatuli page/Courtesy of Project Multatuli)

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ours after publishing a report on alleged police inaction in a South Sulawesi rape case involving three young children, public journalism initiative Project Multatuli was digitally attacked and its website brought down.

“We apologize. Our site was not able to be fully accessed because of a DDoS attack launched last night after the publication of the ‘All Three of My Children were Raped’ article in the #PercumaLaporPolisi [reporting to the police is useless] series,” Project Multatuli tweeted on Thursday morning.

“Repairs are in progress. Our voice will be much louder,” the message continued.

On Oct. 6, Project Multatuli put out a nearly 3,000 word report on a mother’s desperate attempts to get justice for the rape of her three children, all under the age of ten. The sexual assault was allegedly perpetrated by her former husband, who is the children's biological father.

The mother, who used the pseudonym Lydia in the Multatuli report, learned about the incidents from her eldest child. Her two other children later said they had been raped as well.

Living in East Luwu, South Sulawesi, she went to the local Integrated Care Center for the Empowerment of Women and Children (P2TP2A) and the East Luwu Police, where she was interrogated and allegedly accused of acting out of vengeance against her former husband, a prominent civil servant in the area.

After failing to make any progress with either institution, Lydia took a 12-hour ride to Makassar to speak with the South Sulawesi Police. They said they could not find any concrete evidence of rape, despite Lydia’s photos and videos of her children’s injuries and the children’s testimonies.

"It looks very biased. In other cases of sexual violence that we’ve assisted in, the police have usually silenced [the accusers]. But here, they even administered the case to be terminated,” said Rezky Pratiwi of the Makassar Legal Aid Institute (LBH), as quoted in the Multatuli report.

“If the police examination results said there were no injuries and nothing happened, why did the police refuse when I tried to offer these photos and videos? They said, ‘Keep them, there's no need for them,’” said Lydia in the report.

The East Luwu Police alleged on Instagram that the report was a hoax. “The story being reported does not have enough evidence, and we took care of this case on Oct. 9, 2019,” the East Luwu Police's public relations department (@HumasReslutim) said on Instagram Stories

As of 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, Project Multatuli’s site was back up and the report was available. It was also available in the Wayback Machine archive.

Note: This article has been updated to accurately reflect Project Multatuli’s report, which does not reveal the children’s personal information, including their gender.

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