TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Teenage gang violence claims another life in Greater Jakarta
A teenager has been killed in a brawl between two gangs of teenagers who live on the same street.
Change Size
Students engage in a brawl in Gunung Sahari, Sawah Besar, Central Jakarta. (Warta Kota/-)
Y
et another teenager has died in a deadly brawl in Greater Jakarta, with the victim dying of a laceration wound after a fight in Senen, Central Jakarta, on Sunday.
Senen Police Chief Comr. Muhammad Syafe’i said the brawl involved two gangs of teenagers, who were residents of Jl. Kramat II in Kwitang subdistrict, Senen.
“The two groups agreed to meet to fight on social media,” Syafe’i said on Monday as quoted by kompas.com.
Syafe’i said the victim died after his abdomen was slashed with a sickle. The 17-year-old was rushed to a hospital, but died of blood loss.
The police had arrested 18 teenagers involved in the brawl, he said. “From the 18 people we will find out who swung the sickle,” Syafe’i said.
Sunday’s incident is not the first death to occur from teenage violence in Greater Jakarta in the first week of May.
Depok Police in West Java have arrested five teenage suspects after a teenager, identified as RAS, was killed in an act of mob violence on Wednesday. The five teenagers have been identified as AR, 16, MGA, 16, YS, 17, FL, 16, and RA, 17.
According to Depok Police crime division chief Comr. Deddy Kurniawan, RAS had been drinking coffee with a friend in a coffee shop when he saw a group of teenagers fighting near the Proklamasi police post.
“The victim left the coffee shop to see the incident,” Deddy said as quoted by kompas.com.
However, one group of teenagers thought that RAS was a friend of the other gang, and while RAS was on his way home, the teenagers chased after him and slashed him with a sickle. RAS died after suffering wounds to his abdomen and back.
Earlier this year, a senior high school student was killed on the evening of March 14 in a duel with another student that involved sickles in Bogor, West Java, after a heated argument on Facebook.
The 17-year-old student, identified as AH, died from head wounds sustained in the duel with MR, 14, a student at a different school.
Bogor Police crimes division head Adj. Comr. Benny Cahyadi said in a press statement that MR had been arrested. The police have also confiscated the sickles used during the duel and AH's clothes as evidence.
Benny said MR and AH had never met prior to the duel, which took place in Ciampea. The two had interacted on Facebook, where they became embroiled in a heated argument.
Benny stressed that the duel was motivated by a personal grudge resulting from the online argument, and that it was not connected to rivalries between school gangs, a common problem in Bogor.
A study into teenage brawls, known as tawuran in Indonesian, showed that the majority of fights were triggered by "trivial" problems. The researchers believed that the complex psychological condition of the teenagers, related to going through a coming-of-age period and the search for identity, was one of the biggest factors behind the brawls.
Jakarta Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Argo Yuwono said the police were committed to ensuring every case of teenage gang violence ended in court.
“We always investigate, we take them to court, and then the courts decide the punishment,” Argo told The Jakarta Post over the phone on Monday. He added that prosecution of juvenile perpetrators always followed the legal procedures laid out in the Child Protection Law and the Juvenile Law. (gis)
