“Chika is not being punished for having sex,” notes feminist activist Irma Hidayana. “She is being punished for being caught. And more importantly, she is being punished for existing as a sexual being. Indonesian society can accept that men have desires; it cannot accept that women do.” Indonesia is not a theocracy, but public morality is heavily policed by religious authorities. The MUI (Indonesian Ulema Council) routinely issues fatwas against "immoral content." Local police in Bandung raided cafes and boarding houses in the weeks following the scandal, looking for "illicit relationships."
– In the lush, cool hills of Bandung, a city long romanticized as the Parijs van Java (Paris of Java), a different kind of heat has taken hold. The word "Mesum" (a colloquial Indonesian term for lewdness, indecency, or sexual immorality) has become a digital wildfire, inextricably linked to the name of a young woman known only as "Chika Bandung." Free Download Video Mesum Chika Bandung 395
Indonesia loves the idea of Timur (Eastern) politeness and modesty, but it has weaponized technology to enforce that modesty with medieval cruelty. The real indecency—the real mesum —is not a 19-second video of a young woman in Bandung. The real indecency is the million-mob that watched, judged, and destroyed her, then turned off their screens and called themselves virtuous. “Chika is not being punished for having sex,”
However, the demand for the very content they condemn is staggering. Data from SimilarWeb and adult content aggregators consistently place Indonesia among the top global consumers of pornography, despite strict censorship laws. Indonesian society can accept that men have desires;
“The irony is staggering,” says Dr. Sita Dewi, a sociologist at Universitas Padjadjaran in Bandung. “People download the video to their phones, share it with ten groups to ‘condemn’ it, and then demand the woman be arrested. They are simultaneously the perpetrators of the leak’s virality and the enforcers of morality. There is no self-reflection.” The most glaring double standard is gender-based. While Chika’s name, face, and family were paraded online, the male in the video was rarely discussed. When he was mentioned, it was often with a chuckle or a shrug.
Traditional media must stop using clickbait headlines that re-victimize. They should redact names and faces of victims, as is standard in Western privacy law.
“There is a fundamental cognitive dissonance,” explains cultural observer Alwan Ridha. “We watch it privately, then we burn the witch publicly. Chika Bandung is a sacrifice. By destroying her, the public proves to itself that it is still pious. The ritual of shaming her is more important than the act she committed.” The Chika phenomenon is a failure of education. In a country of 280 million people with one of the highest social media usage rates in the world, there is no mandatory, comprehensive digital citizenship curriculum.