Family Silence, Peer Pressure, and Screens: What Drives Adolescent Sexual Violence in Rural Indonesia

Sexual violence against adolescents remains one of the most persistent and under-reported public health problems worldwide, and in Indonesia the scale of the challenge is sharpened by cultural norms that discourage open discussion of sexuality. A new qualitative study published in BMC Public Health by researchers at Universitas Padjadjaran and collaborators in Malaysia has mapped, in unusual detail, how adolescents and the adults around them perceive the forces that shape this violence in Tasikmalaya Regency, a predominantly rural district in West Java. Rather than treating the problem as a matter of individual pathology, the team set out to understand the layered social ecology in which it occurs, drawing on the perspectives of students, parents, teachers, health workers, education officials, social-service staff, and child-protection officers.

The research used a constructivist qualitative design, an approach that treats participants’ own interpretations of their social world as the primary data. Thirteen semi-structured individual interviews and two separate focus group discussions were conducted with 26 participants drawn from seven stakeholder groups. Semi-structured interviews allowed the researchers to follow a consistent topic guide while giving participants room to raise unanticipated concerns, and the focus group discussions created a setting in which shared community norms could surface through dialogue. All procedures were approved by the Research Ethics Committee of Universitas Padjadjaran, and adolescents took part only with written assent alongside written consent from their parents or legal guardians, reflecting the ethical sensitivity of researching violence involving minors.

Analysis was carried out using thematic analysis supported by NVivo, a software platform for organizing and querying qualitative data. The coding process generated 478 distinct coding references, which the team consolidated into six interconnected themes: family and parent-adolescent communication; peer influence, dating, and close social relations; education and sexual violence prevention; digital-related sexual violence; individual vulnerability and adolescent development; and socio-cultural and institutional factors. The sheer breadth of these themes is itself a finding. It indicates that participants did not locate the causes of adolescent sexual violence in any single domain but instead described a web of reinforcing conditions that operate simultaneously at the level of the household, the peer group, the school, the online environment, and the wider culture.

Two themes dominated the accounts. Participants most often described family communication patterns and the peer and dating contexts in which adolescents spend their formative years. In many households in the region, conversations about sexuality, consent, and relationships remain taboo, leaving young people to navigate romantic and sexual situations without accurate information or a trusted adult to consult. This silence, participants suggested, can leave adolescents vulnerable both to perpetration and to victimization, because they lack the vocabulary and confidence to recognize unsafe situations or to seek help when harm occurs. Peer relationships, meanwhile, were described as a double-edged force: close friendships can provide protection and solidarity, but peer pressure and coercive group dynamics can normalize risky or aggressive behavior in dating relationships.

The digital dimension of the problem emerged as a distinct and increasingly urgent theme. Participants identified digital-related sexual violence, including online harassment and unwanted exposure to sexual content, as a growing threat that existing prevention structures have not caught up with. Smartphones have given adolescents access to social worlds that parents and teachers often cannot see, and the study suggests that this gap between young people’s online lives and adult supervision creates space for exploitation. At the same time, participants described barriers to help-seeking that cut across both offline and online harms: weak reporting systems in schools and institutions, fear of blame, and cultural stigma that attaches to victims of sexual violence and deters disclosure.

These institutional findings are particularly significant for policy. The study found that reporting pathways for adolescent victims are fragile, and that stigma operates not only within families but within the very institutions charged with protecting children. When schools, health facilities, and social services lack clear, confidential, and trusted mechanisms for receiving disclosures, adolescents who experience violence are effectively silenced a second time. The researchers also noted socio-cultural factors, including prevailing gender norms and community attitudes toward dating and sexuality, that shape how adults interpret adolescent behavior and how seriously allegations of violence are treated. Together, these observations point to a protection system whose weakest links are not a lack of goodwill but a lack of coordinated, adolescent-centered structures.

From this evidence base, the team constructed a provisional ecological empowerment framework, an organizing model that links interventions across multiple levels of the social environment. The framework connects capacity-building for adolescents themselves with protective peer systems, family strengthening programs, school and institutional safeguards, and community and cross-sector collaboration. The ecological logic is deliberate: violence prevention efforts that target only one level, such as school-based education alone, are likely to be undermined by unaddressed risks at other levels. An empowerment orientation, meanwhile, positions adolescents not merely as passive recipients of protection but as active agents equipped with knowledge, skills, and supportive networks to recognize and resist harm.

The authors are careful to state the limits of what they have built. The framework is empirically informed, meaning it grew directly from the lived accounts of people in Tasikmalaya Regency rather than from imported templates, but it remains provisional. Before its effectiveness can be established, the researchers write, it requires co-design with communities, validation, and prospective evaluation. This is an important methodological honesty in a field where intervention frameworks are sometimes rolled out on the strength of plausible theory alone. The study’s contribution is therefore twofold: it provides a rich, locally grounded description of the contextual drivers of adolescent sexual violence, and it converts that description into a testable structure for future prevention work.

The broader significance of the study lies in its demonstration that adolescent sexual violence cannot be understood, or prevented, in isolation from the everyday contexts of young people’s lives. The World Health Organization frames sexual violence against adolescents as simultaneously a public health, human rights, and child protection concern, and the Tasikmalaya findings show how those three lenses converge in a single district. Family silence about sexuality, peer dynamics in early relationships, unregulated digital exposure, weak institutional reporting, and cultural stigma do not operate independently; each amplifies the others. Any serious prevention strategy must therefore be multi-level by design, engaging parents, peers, schools, health services, and community leaders in coordinated action.

For Indonesia, where a large proportion of the population is adolescent and internet access continues to expand rapidly, the study offers a timely evidence base for national and district-level child protection policy. For the international research community, it adds a rare qualitative account from a rural Southeast Asian setting, where most evidence on adolescent sexual violence still comes from high-income countries. The next step, the researchers indicate, is to work with the communities whose voices shaped the framework, refining it into practical programs and testing whether strengthening family communication, peer systems, and institutional safeguards actually reduces harm. Until that evaluation is done, the study stands as a careful, ethically grounded map of a problem that too often remains hidden behind stigma and silence.

Subject of Research: Contextual factors associated with adolescent sexual violence in Tasikmalaya Regency, Indonesia, and an ecological empowerment framework for prevention

Article Title: Exploring contextual factors associated with adolescent sexual violence in Tasikmalaya Regency, Indonesia: a qualitative study informing an ecological empowerment framework

Article References: Hanifa, F., Arisanti, N., Solehati, T., Latif, R. A., Sunjaya, D. K., & Dhamayanti, M. (2026). Exploring contextual factors associated with adolescent sexual violence in Tasikmalaya Regency, Indonesia: a qualitative study informing an ecological empowerment framework. BMC Public Health. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-026-29735-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-026-29735-6

Keywords: adolescent health, sexual violence, qualitative research, Indonesia, ecological framework, empowerment, parent-adolescent communication, peer influence, digital violence, child protection, public health, thematic analysis