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Sexual violence in Indonesian University: On students’ critical consciousness and
agency
Ainal Fitri*, Muhammad Haekal**, Almukarramah***, Fitri Meliya Sari****
*Universitas Serambi Mekkah, Banda Aceh, Indonesia
Email: ainal.fitri@serambimekkah.ac.id
**Universitas Islam Negeri Ar-Raniry, Banda Aceh, Indonesia
Email: muhammad.haekal@ar-raniry.ac.id
***Universitas Serambi Mekkah, Banda Aceh, Indonesia
Email: almukarramah@serambimekkah.ac.id
****Universitas Islam Negeri Ar-Raniry, Banda Aceh, Indonesia
Email: fitrimeliyasari@gmail.com
*Corresponding author, email: ainal.fitri@serambimekkah.ac.id
Received: June 15, 2021 Accepted: September 1, 2021 Published: September 30, 2021
ABSTRACT
This qualitative study analysed how aspects of critical consciousness in
students played a role in the issue of sexual violence in a higher education
institution. This research involved students, lecturers, and elements of
higher education leaders of a university in Aceh, Indonesia. For the data
collection method, the researchers used semi-structured interviews. The
data was analysed using thematic analysis with the utilization of critical
consciousness and student agency concept as the theoretical frameworks.
This study found that aspects of critical consciousness played a significant
role in dealing with sexual violence issues in university. Without critical
consciousness, students would potentially err in analysing the issue of
sexual violence. Aspects of students' critical consciousness were also
influenced by the structure or discourse of higher education in viewing
sexual violence. The tendency of campus to be more concerned with its good
reputation also exacerbated the handling and prevention of sexual violence
cases. The implication of this research is the finding that critical
consciousness and institutional structure influence each other, both
positively and negatively. To deal with sexual violence, a university must
promote critical consciousness among students and academics, create pro
survivors’ discourse and underpin students' agency, and most importantly,
strive to cultivate gender equity perspective among university leaders.
Future research should focus on investigating effective pedagogy to nurture
critical consciousness for supporting the anti-sexual violence agenda in a
higher education institution.
Keywords: Critical consciousness; higher education; sexual violence;
student agency.
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ABSTRAK
Penelitian kualitatif ini menganalisis bagaimana aspek kesadaran kritis
pada mahasiswa berperan dalam isu kekerasan seksual di perguruan tinggi.
Penelitian ini melibatkan mahasiswa, dosen, dan unsur pimpinan perguruan
tinggi pada sebuah kampus di Aceh, Indonesia. Untuk pengambilan data,
peneliti menggunakan wawancara semi-terstruktur. Analisis tematik
digunakan untuk menganalis data dengan dilengkapi oleh konsep kesadaran
kritis dan student agency sebagai kerangka teoritis. Penelitian ini
menemukan bahwa aspek kesadaran kritis berperan besar dalam
menghadapi isu kekerasan seksual di perguruan tinggi. Tanpa kesadaran
kritis, mahasiswa akan berpotensi keliru dalam menganalisis persoalan
kekerasan seksual secara komprehensif. Aspek kesadaran kritis mahasiswa
juga dipergaruhi oleh struktur atau diskursus perguruan tinggi dalam
melihat isu kekerasan seksual. Kecenderungan kampus yang lebih peduli
pada reputasi atau nama baik kampus juga semakin memperparah
penanganan dan pencegahan isu kekerasan seksual. Implikasi dari
penelitian ini adalah temuan bahwa kesadaran kritis dan struktur institusi
saling mempengaruhi, baik secara positif maupun negatif. Untuk menangani
kekerasan seksual, perguruan tinggi harus mempromosikan kesadaran kritis
di kalangan mahasiswa dan akademisi, menciptakan wacana pro korban
dan mendukung student agency, dan yang terpenting, berusaha untuk
menumbuhkan perspektif kesetaraan gender di antara para pimpinan
kampus. Penelitian di masa depan harus fokus pada penyelidikan mengenai
pedagogi yang efektif untuk menumbuhkan kesadaran kritis untuk
mendukung agenda anti-kekerasan seksual di perguruan tinggi.
Kata Kunci: Kesadaran kritis; perguruan tinggi; kekerasan seksual;
student agency.
1. INTRODUCTION
Sexual violence has been a severe issue in higher education on a global scale.
We have noticed many reported forms of sexual violence, including rape, intimidation,
or sexual harassment, such as unwanted touching, stalking, and cat-calling in university.
We have also observed various supported background or motivation, including quid pro
quo aided by power relations. The perpetrators who have a strong background such as
professor, and dominant position in the social structure like male academics, could
make this case more challenging to be solved. Also, the patriarchal culture that has been
deeply rooted in the higher education structure has created a circle of evil that further
lead to nurture survivor-blaming and silencing behaviour for the sake of campus
reputation.
Globally, research on sexual violence in higher education is considered
abundant. Researchers have investigated this issue from many perspectives, themes, and
intentions. One of the latest studies highlighted the optimistic approach to design
feminist education for the university community as a pedagogical tool for dealing with
sexual violence (Jones, Chappell, & Alldred, 2021). It might be essential as another
155
study discovered that handling sexual violence cases might be negatively influenced by
how higher education operated in the age of neoliberalism (Hurtado, 2021).
In Indonesia, we also found a growing number of investigations on sexual
violence, despite the amount of research on a local and global scale is incomparable; for
instance, in the latest study conducted in an Islamic Higher Education Institution in
West Java involving 333 respondents (students, employees, and lecturers), it was found
that 27.5 percent of respondents had experienced verbal sexual violence, and 13.8
percent of them had experienced non-verbal sexual violence (Muhsin, Ma’mun, &
Nuroniyah, 2021). The study also indicated that 71 percent of the incidents occurred
during lectures, extracurricular activities, and so forth. However, it is difficult to find
academic research focused on sexual violence cases in higher education settings in the
Acehnese context.
In this qualitative research, we conducted a phenomenological study involving
ten students and four faculty members from a university in Aceh, Indonesia. We centred
our study on students’ critical consciousness, agency, and structure aspect because we
found limited investigations, both on a local and global scale, which focused on
studying students’ roles in sexual violence issues and how an educational institution
affected them. By conducting in-depth interviews, we tried to explore how those
elements could affect how students responded to sexual violence issues on campus. In
addition, previous works of the literature showed that students had a high probability of
becoming sexual violence victims based on their weak position in the structural
hierarchy of campus and their needs at the personal and academic level. Thus, studying
the students would provide them adequate space to express their voice, idea, and
aspiration against this issue. In addition, by positioning critical consciousness, agency,
and structure as analysis elements, we also believed that students might potentially play
a significant position to tackle this issue on campus.
We believe that studying sexual violence in any settings is a challenging task.
Researchers must be meticulous in dealing with the safety of participants, especially
survivors, and themselves as the investigators. If it is not executed assiduously, the
researchers may potentially put the survivors and themselves in danger. We perceived
those negative consequences might contribute to the lack of available research on this
issue in Indonesia. Thus, this study would contribute to scholarly conversation on
sexual violence in Indonesia or Southeast Asia, particularly in providing space for
students to express their voice.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
This section will provide the definition and previous works on sexual violence
issues in higher education and how they provided insightful concepts to our
investigation. We would also explain the prior studies on critical consciousness,
agency, and structure, and how it supported our study as the theoretical framework to
analyse sexual violence issues on campus.
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2.1. Definition and type
Many scholars and organisations have conceptualised sexual violence as a
definition. In this study, we selected a definition formed by the World Health
Organization (WHO). It defines sexual violence as:
Any sexual acts attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or
advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality
using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in
any setting. (WHO, 2012, as cited in Islam & Hossain, 2021, p.1)
Sexual violence is often used interchangeably or separately with other terms,
including sexual harassment, sexual abuse, and sexual assault. We are aware that all of
the terms have distinct senses and characteristics. However, in this study, we would
only use sexual violence to encompass all types of sexual misconduct in the hope of
avoiding confusion among readers.
Regarding the variation of sexual violence, a categorisation from the Indonesian
National Commission on Violence against Women (Komnas Perempuan) would be
helpful. It categorises sexual violence into fifteen types:
Rape, sexual intimidation, sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, sexually
motivated human trafficking, forced prostitution, sexual slavery, forced
marriage, forced pregnancy, forced abortion, forced contraception or
sterilization, sexual torture, sexually inhuman punishment, a sexually dangerous
and discriminative tradition for women, and sexual control (Komnas Perempuan,
2012, p.4).
We noticed that not all of the sexual violence types took place in a higher
education context. Nevertheless, we put the categorisation to show how multifarious
sexual violence is. Additionally, the categorisation itself must be seen as fluid. For
instance, sexual violence could encompass other malicious activities in this digital age,
such as revenge porn (Fairbairn, 2015) usually distributed online as shaming,
blackmailing, or extorting weapons.
2.2. Sexual violence in higher education
Historically, one of the earliest reports on sexual violence could be traced from
Kirkpatrick and Kanin’s study in 1957 (Jessup-Anger, Lopez, & Koss, 2018). They
studied the aggressiveness of men in dating-courtship relationships on campus, based on
the reports from women. The respondents in that study reported how men used
aggressive force to have sexual intimacy with them. The study was becoming a
foundation for other studies on sexual violence in that era. Jessup-Anger et al. (2018)
further provided some crucial highlights on essential findings regarding sexual violence
research, including the lack of institutional definition of sexual violence and limited
sexual awareness programs for new students. The unavailability of a formal definition
157
and adequate campaign of sexual violence on campus would make students unaware of
the violence, even after they had become a victim.
On the other hand, we found difficulty finding when the earliest research on
sexual violence in higher education was conducted in Indonesia. The earliest research
timeframe could show when academics started to have awareness about Indonesian
higher education. However, regardless of the data limitation, we observed that the
research on sexual violence in Indonesia intensified in recent years. One of its causes
was potentially the significant dissemination of the ‘#MeToo’ hashtag circularised in
eighty-five countries, including Palestine, Indonesia, Japan, and South Korea (Gill &
Orgad, 2018).
Sexual violence in higher education could occur in many forms, like rape,
attempted rape, and unwanted touching (Moorman & Osborne, 2015). One of the most
commons sexual violence on campus is related to power relations and quid pro quo. In
Ghana and Tanzania, for instance, it was found that a male professor asked a female
student for sex to get an excellent academic grade (Morley, 2011). Karami, White, Ford,
Swan, and Spinel's study (2020) found that the majority of sexual violence cases often
involved perpetrators from higher social or academic rank (e.g., professor, senior
lecturer, and supervisor) and survivors from the lower rank (e.g., junior staff and
students). In terms of gender, the study also uncovered that 89.99% of harassers were
male, 5.09% female, and 4.92% from other genders (Karami et al., 2020).
Sexual violence could produce a devastating impact on its survivors. A report
from the American Congressional Research Service described that the victim of sexual
violence could suffer much consequence both personally and academically (Gonzalez &
Feder, 2016). They could endure physical and mental issues, including depression, post-
traumatic stress disorder, drug abuse, unintended pregnancy, that could lead them to
encounter a drop in their academic performance.
2.3. How Indonesian university dealt with sexual violence
A massive reported case of sexual violence in Indonesian higher education
institutions was initiated in 2019 by four Indonesian mass media companies: Tirto.id,
The Jakarta Post, VICE Indonesia, and BBC Indonesia. The reportage was entitled
‘#NamaBaikKampus’ or ‘#CampusReputation’ and involved 179 sexual violence
survivors from seventy-nine (state, private, and religious) higher education institutions
in twenty-nine cities in Indonesia (Adjie, 2020). The report uncovered sexual violence
allegation cases in Indonesian universities. The title ‘#CampusReputation’ outlined how
Indonesian universities concealed sexual violence cases for campus reputation. The
universities would try any possible way to save their reputation and silencing the
survivors.
Several international studies also supported the findings above. For example, a
study found that victims of sexual violence in university often hesitated to report the
cases because they feared that their issue would not be taken seriously (Kirkner, Lorenz,
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& Mazar, 2020). In addition, universities often neglected the victim of sexual violence
with very little attention on seriously dealing with their cases (Marshall, Dalyot, &
Galloway, 2014). Therefore, it would be inevitable that sexual violence survivors in
university were experiencing isolation. One of the causes was the structuration of the
communication process (Dykstra-DeVette & Tarin, 2019) that further led them to feel
alone and alienated while seeking justice.
A study in Indonesia also found that policies on dealing with sexual violence
could be found in Indonesian universities. However, it would be challenging to get
justice for the survivors if it was not supported by knowledgeable university staff and
convenient campus bureaucracy (Nikmatullah, 2020). Furthermore, another study in the
country also found that the patriarchal culture could negatively impact female survivors
(Munir & Junaini, 2020). The patriarchal culture is considered rooted in Indonesian
academia as the cause of the low female participation and the limited gender equity
knowledge among male senior faculty members (Haekal & Fitri, 2020).
2.4. Critical consciousness, agency, and structure
Freire, a distinguished critical theorist and educator from Brazil, originated the
conscientização or critical consciousness concept. He believed that the oppression could
be defeated when the oppressed people had critical consciousness to analyse their social
condition and living world (Shih, 2018).
Christens, Winn, and Duke (2016) provided an essential synthesis of the critical
consciousness concept from other scholars who categorised it into three components:
critical reflection, political efficacy, and critical action.
Table 1
Critical consciousness components
No
Components
Brief Description
1
Critical reflection
The ability to analyse inequities and injustices connected to
one’s social conditions.
2
Political efficacy
The sense that the individual or a collective has the ability
and capacity to change their political and social conditions
(Watts et al. 2011, as cited in Christens et al., 2016, p.17).
3
Critical Action
Critical action occurs when individuals actively seek to
change their unjust conditions through policy reform,
practices, or programs.
(Christens et al., 2016, p.17)
Thomas et al. (2014) had also provided important stages of critical
consciousness: precritical, beginning critical, critical, and post-critical.
159
Table 2
Critical consciousness stages
No
Stages
Brief Description
1
Precritical
Issues of inequity and oppression are not recognised.
2
Beginning critical
Individuals would begin to recognise oppression and
inequity.
3
Critical
The person has a solid sense of critical consciousness.
4
Post-critical
Some form of personal or social action in response to
oppression or inequity.
(Thomas et al., 2014, p.489)
We found minimal studies correlated critical consciousness and sexual violence
issues in higher education regarding the prior research. For example, a study from the
United States of America reported that when students (as the bystanders or witnesses)
had critical consciousness, they would tend to intervene in sexual assault incidents
(Rojas-Ashe, Walker, Holmes, & Johnson, 2019). However, the study had not
investigated whether there were other factors (besides critical consciousness) supporting
students to survive or motivating them to act against the sexual violence cases.
We also utilised student agency and structure as other theoretical frameworks.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) presented an
insightful explanation about student agency:
Student agency relates to the development of an identity and a sense of
belonging. When students develop agency they rely on motivation, hope, self-
efficacy and a growth mindset (the understanding that abilities and intelligence
can be developed) to navigate towards well-being. This enables them to act with
a sense of purpose, which guides them to flourish and thrive in society. (OECD,
2019, p.5)
In addition, structure is defined as “rules and resources recursively implicated in
social reproduction; institutionalized features of social systems have structural
properties in the sense that relationships are stable across time and space” (Giddens,
1984, as cited in Powell, 2018, p.3).
We would utilise all of the concepts above as the theoretical frameworks to
analyse the sexual violence issue from students’ perspectives.
3. METHOD
This qualitative study used phenomenology as its research genre. The approach
centralised on investigating the synthesis of essential lived experiences, events, and
concepts from research participants (Saldaña, 2011). The participants of this research
were ten undergraduate students and six faculty members from a university in Aceh,
Indonesia. We selected the participants using purposive (or purposeful) sampling
(Leavy, 2017) to get the best data for our investigation. In terms of defining the sample
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size, we used the concept of saturation (Dworkin, 2012), in which we finished
gathering the data after finding no new information or insights. The participants would
remain anonymous during this study to protect their safety and privacy. As the data
collection method, we used offline and online semi-structured interviews. According to
Brinkman (2014), semi-structured interviews would allow researchers to get better data
because it would enable them to follow respondents’ perspectives during interviews.
Additionally, we utilised thematic analysis to analyse the findings with the enrichment
of the aforementioned theoretical frameworks. The thematic analysis is a deliberative
process of understanding the intricacy of meanings by organising the data into
explorable patterns and themes (Sundler, Lindberg, Nilsson, & Palmér, 2019).
4. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
In this section, we would discuss the findings by utilising thematic analysis and
the aforementioned theoretical frameworks. We would present the discussion in three
subsections. On reporting the respondents’ perspective, we would use pseudonyms (if
necessary) to protect their privacy.
4.1. Students’ critical consciousness of sexual violence
We found that most of the students’ respondents did not have a complete
concept of sexual violence. Some of them even knew firstly about sexual violence from
this study. Some respondents had vague or incomplete definitions of the concept. For
instance, a female student described sexual violence as a non-consensual sexual
intimacy, while a male student defined it as raping underage children or minors. Their
inability to provide a complete definition of sexual violence makes students more
susceptible, especially as victims. They might not know that they had already become
victims. Like a testimony of one female student, she could not determine whether a
male student had harassed her, but she felt uncomfortable with it. She said, “I am
uncomfortable with his act, but I don’t want to take it seriously.” She also did not report
the case because she did not want to get into any more trouble with the university.
The majority of respondents were aware of the position of women as the
susceptible group on sexual violence issues. However, some students, particularly the
male, believed that protection against sexual violence is a personal obligation, not an
institution. A male respondent, for instance, stated the importance of female students to
dress politely and not going outside after 10 PM. “If they (female students) are away in
the late evening, they will put themselves at risk of becoming sexual violence victims,”
he said.
On the other hand, most female respondents believed that the students had to
dress politely and religiously. However, a female respondent said that if sexual violence
still happened, it did not correlate with female outfits. “In my opinion, all female
students in this university have dressed politely following the regulation. So, if sexual
violence still occurs, it must be because of other reasons,” she described. Regarding the
outfits, The Body Shop Indonesia had held a virtual exhibition of sexual violence
161
survivors (Magdalene, 2021). From the exhibition, we could observe that despite the
female survivors had dressed appropriately, and sexual violence still took place. Thus,
the claimed that outfits linked to sexual violence did not have solid factual standings, as
also supported by Moor’s (2010) research. Additionally, the claim of female outfits as
the cause of sexual violence on women had been widely campaigned by the mass
media, as suggested by Najib’s (2020) study. It would put more burdens on the female
survivors as the ones who often got blamed.
Figure 1. Outfits of sexual violence survivors on a virtual exhibition conducted by The
Body Shop Indonesia (Magdalene, 2021). For full access to the exhibition, please click:
https://virtualtour.tbsfightforsisterhood.co.id/
Despite their low number, we also found that few female respondents demanded
that the university provide specific education on sexual violence, especially for students.
“I think the students still have limited knowledge on sexual violence, including myself.
So, I think it’s crucial,” said a female student.
Based on the findings, most students have reached the precritical stage of
critical consciousness on the sexual violence issue. At the very best, some of them had
reached the beginning critical stage of critical consciousness. In consequence, it was
difficult for the majority of students to understand the issue of sexual violence. Only a
few students recognised the issue, but only at a beginning level, not a complete
understanding. Therefore, we argued that with their current stage of understanding the
issue, they had not reached the level of critical consciousness. They had the minimal
potential to do critical reflection, political efficacy, and critical action against the issue
of sexual violence. They even had more possibility of falsely understanding this issue,
for instance, by positioning victims or survivors as the ones who were responsible for
any sexual violence incidents. In addition, we also examined that the university
structure negatively affected the students’ critical consciousness and agency on the
sexual violence issue. We would discuss it further in the following subsection.
162
4.2. The hidden sexual violence incidents on campus
The majority of male students and some female students believed that their
campus was safe and free from sexual violence cases. During their study, they never
heard any incidents related to sexual violence. One male respondent even said
confidently that no way sexual violence could happen on campus.
However, different insights were given by some faculty members. A female
lecturer said that she knew about two sexual violence incidents during her job on
campus—both of the cases involving male lecturers as the perpetrators and female
students as the survivors. The first case was an unwanted touching during a lecture that
happened in an uncrowded classroom. The second case was related to sexual intimacy.
Both of the cases were resolved through mediation. No cases were brought to police or
end in a lawsuit. The campus often treated sexual violence cases as consensual
intimacy, especially male lecturers and female students. She was afraid that this kind of
settlement would never deter the harassers.
Another female lecturer also knew about one sexual violence case on campus. A
male lecturer sexually harassed a female student. The perpetrator had a strong social
and academic position on campus. He had a doctoral degree and a structural position.
Later, he was asked by the university to resign. He resigned, and later he found a new
teaching job in another university. Moreover, surprisingly, the survivor was also
expelled from the university. “The case settlement is not pro-victim,” she said. In
addition, the university did not bring the case to the police. It has never been opened to
the public, including among academicians. Only a few faculty members knew about the
case. The carelessness of the campus to ‘release’ the perpetrator without bringing him to
justice would also potentially put people at his new workplace at risk.
A female university leader explained another sexual violence case. It involved a
lecturer who was considered a religious figure on campus. He committed sexual
violence by sending raunchy text messages to some female students. The university
punished him by suspending him to teach for one year. However, the case only ended
there. Currently, the perpetrator was still teaching and even had a structural position on
campus. She added, “We didn’t report his misconduct to his faculty because it would
affect the campus reputation.” It showed that the campus worked hard to protect its
reputation without thinking about the safety of its students and academics, especially the
recovery of the sexual violence survivors.
A study in Indonesia highlighted that the tendency to conceal and protect
institution reputation might be potentially influenced by religious and cultural aspects
(Istiadah, Indah, & Rosdiana, 2020). It described the difficulty of dealing with sexual
violence cases as the institution often showed limited support, and the survivors tended
to remain silent (motivated by socio-cultural and religious dogma) to shield themselves
and the institution. However, regarding the link between religiosity and students’
position as bystanders, another study found that the religious aspect in individual level
could elevate students’ confidence to report sexual violence incidents (Rusyidi, Bintari,
163
& Wibowo, 2021). As the study conducted in Aceh (the only Sharia province in
Indonesia), the religious aspect might be either seen as an inhibiting factor or a
motivating factor in handling sexual violence cases.
4.3. University structure and student agency
The university did not have specific regulations on sexual violence. One of the
university leaders said that there was a general regulation from the Ministry of Higher
Education. However, she was unsure that the university had socialised it widely to the
students and lecturer, nor it is integrated into university policy. She added, “We don’t
have any formal reporting systems for students to reports sexual violence cases. So, they
usually report the cases by communicating to faculty members, like a student advisor.”
For instance, she explained a case where two female students reported a male lecturer
who sexually harassed them by sending raunchy text messages. The case was noticed
after the survivors reported the villainy to a faculty member. Even though it showed that
the ‘informal’ report worked, but it could not be seen as the success for the institution to
prevent and deal with sexual violence cases. Since there was no formal report system,
any act of resistance could only be seen as a sign of individual courage and it might not
be perceived as a collective and systemic movement.
In addition, a male university leader also said that the regulation of sexual
violence was not needed since there was no ‘extraordinary’ case of sexual violence.
Further, he believed that the university must protect its reputation at all costs. He said,
“If sexual violence cases on campus exposed, it would bring destructive effect on the
institution reputation.” He further asserted that when a sexual violence case could be
settled peacefully/ amicably, then he did not have any logical reasons to make it
complicated, for instance bringing the perpetrators to justice. His response at one point
showed that he had limited sensitivity towards the sexual violence issue, especially from
the survivor’s perspective.
The findings that there were no regulations, rules, and the intention to disclose
the sexual violence incidents had weakened the anti-sexual violence campaign on
campus. The university structure did not support the anti-sexual violence narrative, and
it did not support the growth of student agency on sexual violence issues. This essential
element might be used to understand the institutional norms and perceptions used to
design sexual violence prevention strategies (Banyard, Rizzo, Bencosme, Cares, &
Moynihan, 2021). It even perpetuated and normalised the sexual violence incidents on
campus by indirectly defending the perpetrators and neglecting the survivors.
Another negative impact was that most students did not have critical
consciousness of sexual violence and even had a false conception. Most of them only
sat on the precritical stage of critical consciousness. It would make them unable to even
identified sexual violence cases. Few of the students had a position on beginning
critical stage that they started to recognise sexual violence cases. However, to initiate
social action, they need to position themselves in the critical and then post-critical
164
stage, as suggested by Thomas et al. (2014). Furthermore, the lack of critical
consciousness in the advanced stage would make students unable to engage in critical
reflection, which might later develop into political efficacy and critical action. Further,
we argued that university structure would always play a vital role in affecting critical
consciousness and later agency, both in positive and negative ways. Therefore, to create
the reform, a university must have a healthy structure that might not be actualised by
hoping the university leaders (and its adherents) change, but by the reform initiated by
the oppressed students and faculty members.
5. CONCLUSION
The study has found two essential findings. Firstly, without critical
consciousness on sexual violence, students would never initiate any reform to deal with
the issue. Secondly, university structure could affect the positioning of student agency
and critical consciousness on the sexual violence issue. The university must be run by
individuals who had a gender equity perspective and critical consciousness to recognise
or analyse any oppression in university, including sexual violence. If the reform is
difficult to achieve from the university leadership position, then any academics,
students, or faculty members must act to initiate the change.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was funded by the Ministry of Research and Technology of the
Republic of Indonesia (RISTEK–BRIN), Novice Lecturer Research Cluster (PDP) in
Higher Education Institution without Legal Entity, 2021 Fiscal Year.
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