KEKERASAN VERBAL DI RUANG DIGITAL: ANALISIS FOUCAULDIAN TENTANG DISKURSUS PELECEHAN SEKSUAL VERBAL PADA KASUS FAKULTAS HUKUM UNIVERSITAS INDONESIA

Abstract

This study examines how discourse on verbal sexual harassment was produced, contested, and legitimized in digital space following the April 2026 sexual harassment case at the Faculty of Law, Universitas Indonesia (FH UI). Verbal harassment remains one of the least examined forms of campus sexual violence, since it leaves no physical evidence and is often dismissed as trivial. This case is analytically significant because a private WhatsApp conversation, once leaked onto the X (formerly Twitter) platform, rapidly transformed into a national public discourse involving the institution, the perpetrators' parents, student organizations, and the online public. The study adopts a qualitative interpretive approach through Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA), adapted from Carabine (2001) and Khan and MacEachen (2021), applied to X posts, institutional statements, national news coverage, and relevant policy documents collected between April and June 2026. Four competing discursive formations were identified: a trivializing "joke" discourse produced by the perpetrators, a campus-reputation discourse produced by the institution, a safe-space and victim-protection counter-discourse produced by students and activists, and a victim-blaming discourse that ultimately failed to gain legitimacy. Analysis of power-knowledge relations shows that discursive authority remained unevenly distributed among the institution, national media, and digital publics, while victims' voices were present only through mediation by other parties. Two contesting regimes of truth emerged: a legal-institutional regime emphasizing due process and confidentiality, and a victim-protection regime emphasizing survivors' testimony and public accountability. The institution's eventual imposition of graduated sanctions is read not as the triumph of either regime, but as a negotiated compromise between them. These findings suggest that higher-education institutions need crisis-communication protocols foregrounding victims' experience over procedural language alone, and that digital activism can meaningfully reconfigure, without fully dismantling, institutional hierarchies of discursive authority.