Borobudur Law and Society Journal

Sexual violence against children in Magelang Regency is persistent, and Law No 12 of 2022 on Sexual Violence Crimes places the handling, protection and recovery of victims on regional governments. In the regency these duties fall to a merged department, the Social, Population Control and Family Planning, Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Service, within which a technical unit for the protection of women and children was formed in 2025. This article examines how the Service protects child victims of sexual violence, how far its practice meets the statutory duties, and what obstructs it. It is normative-empirical legal research combining statutory analysis with one interview with a regency-level assistant of the Service and published reports, analysed descriptively and qualitatively. The Service offers reporting channels down to village level, a complaint procedure and rehabilitation by three regency assistants; it handled 11 child cases in 2023 and 16 in 2024. Measured against the statute, its intake and information duties are met, but trained assistance, protection from intimidation, responses to forced marriage of victims and written coordination with police and other agencies are not shown. The main obstacles are hidden offences and late disclosure, shame and stigma, marriage of victims to offenders and pressure from offenders’ families. The article recommends assistant training, a coordination protocol, a budget line and a case-management system.