Send the victim to prison
Male boss sexually harasses female underling. She records one of his phone calls. She is sentenced to six months in prison.
Indonesia’s top court has rejected an appeal by a woman who was sentenced to six months in prison for recording and sharing a phone conversation she had with her boss to prove that he was sexually harassing her.
The Supreme Court said Baiq Nuril Maknun was guilty of spreading “indecent” material.
Her boss reported her to the police in 2015 after the recording was circulated.
Rights groups condemned the ruling.
Nuril had complained of getting lewd phone calls from the head teacher of the school she worked at in Mataram, a city on the island of Lombok.
So she recorded one of his calls, and shared it with staff at the school and the head of an education agency. It went viral on social media. The man reported her to the police.
The Supreme Court found her guilty in November of “violating decency” under Indonesia’s electronic information and transactions law. On Thursday, it dismissed her efforts to have the verdict overturned, saying she had failed to produce new evidence.
The court also fined her 500 million rupiah (£28,200; $35,200).
The case has sparked outrage in Indonesia, with rights groups warning that the verdict sends a worrying message to victims of sexual harassment.
“We are concerned about the impact of this decision because it opens a door for perpetrators of sexual violence to criminalise victims,” Ade Wahyudin, executive director of the Legal Aid Foundation for the Press, told Reuters news agency.
H/t Soraya
Sometimes, explaining how patriarchal norms infuse laws is hard. NOT TODAY. After months of harassment, Nuril Maknun recorded one of boss’ phone calls. She’s been sentenced to at least 6 months in jail for “distributing lewd material.” He’s been promoted. https://t.co/2cDQxRvI5S
— Soraya Chemaly (@schemaly) July 6, 2019
No words.
HE’S the one who “distributed lewd material” to HER using public/corporate infrastructure to do so. HE should be going to jail.
Well that was meant for her ears only. She’s supposed to take that as a compliment. She should be flattered by that sort of attention. It’s so embarrassing for a man to have his advances rebuffed and that rebuffal (and those advances) splashed around in public. We are such delicate creatures, after all. Besides, he might be married! Think of his good name!! His secrets become her secrets, which she must accept, endure, and take to her grave.
https://twitter.com/tryingattimes/status/1146752901731233792
I wish this attitude were hyperbole. I couldn’t believe it when one of my bosses said this to me back in 1992 about a sexual harassment that I reported. I guess I should consider myself lucky. My report set in motion a chain of affairs that led to my losing my job; at least I didn’t end up in jail.
This is a disgrace.
YNNB:
It’s amazing how often that attitude comes up. Privacy is a really complicated issue. We constantly rely on expectations of privacy that make no sense and are routinely abused. And then we usually don’t change those expectations or we change the expectations but not our behaviour. Either way, we end up miserable.
You know what? I was going to slide into a big rant about privacy and how expectations of privacy and security theatre are used all the time to rob us of stuff we need, such as our ability to blow whistles that really need blowing, as in this case. When an expectation of privacy trumps the revealing of harmful behaviour and targeted abuse then we ought to be more concerned that there’s no longer an expectation of sanity.
Fortunately, I realised just in time that I’m one of about nine people on the planet who finds this sort of stuff interesting, so I’ll spare you. But yeah, ~Bruce, that is exactly the attitude that poor woman has fallen foul of and it is insane to everyone who is not an abuser.
Which begins to look like a smaller and smaller field every day.
latsot – that rant sounds interesting to me. I say go ahead and do the rant.
Thanks, Ophelia. History has shown that I probably shouldn’t be encouraged (just in general) but I’ll do the rant next time my dander is up and hang the consequences. Which is more or less what my CV says these days anyway.