Seriously, it’s already 2020 and things like this should be nothing but a remnant of the past!
A shocking occurence happened in the Pasaman Regency of West Sumatra on Aug 30 (Saturday) whereby a mob stripped a woman to her bare chest and forced her to do a ‘walk of shame’ while crowds gather and cheered on. Absolutely disgusting behaviour from the locals!
As reported by Indonesian news agency Liputan6, the woman was given a ‘social punishment’ after she was allegedly caught being intimate with a man out of wedlock. The villagers also claimed that she has been caught with the same man twice before.
A screenshot from the viral video
The video went viral in Indonesian social media and even was posted on Youtube before it was promptly taken down, in breach of the site’s policies and rightly so. However, the video is still circulating via chat apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram and others.
In the video, the woman can be seen being forcefully stripped to her bare chest. At one point, she tried to pull up her pants to cover her nude upper half of the body but one man from the crowd pulled them back down.
Even more shocking was the fact that the mob that gathered even included several children.
West Sumatra Police spokesperson Stefanus Satake Setianto said,
“The woman in the video was apprehended by residents for committing an obscene act,”
He further commented that the police is investigating who filmed the video and may charge them for violating an Indonesian Act called “Information and Electronic Transactions Act”.
Indonesia’s Komnas Perempuan Commissioner, Siti Aminah.
The action of the villagers have sparked outrage across Indonesia, especially from The Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan). Its commissioner Siti Aminah was quoted by Detik News of saying,
“The villagers who did this despicable act should be charged with performing an immoral act in public, punishable under the Indonesian Criminal Code.”
However, as reported by Coconuts, these sort of vigilante acts often go unpunished in Indonesia. Hopefully, they come to their senses and not take the law into their own hands.
