Commentary on Women’s Body: Shedding Lights on Verbal Sexual Harassment in Indonesia

Abstract

This paper discusses university student’s perception of appearance-related comments as verbal sexual harassment from men to women responding to Indonesia’s sexual violence bill 2022 that introduced three variables in categorizing sexual utterance; the content of the comment, the social relations of the speaker and the interlocutor, and the part of the physical/body being commented on. This study also aims to untangle the complexity of verbal sexual harassment as a socio-cultural construction by discussing how the respondents categorize sexual harassment based on their relationships. Following the bill's categorization of verbal sexual harassment, this study lies under the Prototype theory (first proposed by Geeraerts, 1989), which believes in category membership in utterance. This theory is utillised as a method for determining the classification of sexual harassment based on the three variables provided by the bill. A survey was administered to 100 female and male university students in two cities in Indonesia through an anonymous online survey. It is revealed that if the comment contains sexual nuances indicated by the use of specific adjectives, it is classified as sexual harassment. The intensity of the harassment is influenced by the part of the body that is commented on and the attributive adjectives. Furthermore, the social relationships between the speaker and the interlocutor also influence the intensity of harassment. The greater the social distance between speakers and interlocutors, the greater the intensity of harassment.