Angry. Sad. I need to vent.

Deciding to stay away from the social media, as not to read her stories, was an available choice for me. But she didn’t have easy choices. She only had limited suffocating choices.

The pain was too much to handle on her own that she choose the only way she knew how to stop the pain. Yet now there are still some people, in such a dubious moral high ground, that scrutinize her life choices. “That’s not the way to solve a problem..”, “she brought all those problems upon herself..”, “why didn’t she leave the guy..”

Does it need that much effort to ask questions like “how could a guy treat her girlfriend like that?”, “how the guy’s family has the heart to force her having abortion?”

What kind of society are we that we fail to see who should be taking responsibility? So I guess we never find it too hard putting thieves -be it petty or big theft-, drug traffickers, murderers etc to jails, but when a sexual violence victim’s life been robbed, it become such a big hassle that “diselesaikan secara kekeluargaan” (Indonesian terms for resolving dispute in a “friendly way”, outside the juidicial system) seems to be the sole solution.

Then you wonder why all the potential perpetrators would always keep doing the unspeakable to potential victims ? Because they know they could get away with it. The state’s laws are hazy at best. People will always be divided between those who choose to believes the victims first and those who choose to be neutral -“because hey, until the investigation and court haven’t proven and decided anything, I will choose to stand by no one’ side.”