The article that I reviewed is “Gender-Based Cyber Violence: A Challenge to Gender Equality in Indonesia” by Hesti Armiwulan.

This article has several ways it relates to the principles of social sciences.  The article examines how social policies can impact human behavior – in this case how government can reduce gender-based violence with social policies.  It uses the scientific theory to form a hypothesis and then test that idea to see if it is sound or not which is a tenet of social science and science in general.

The question of the study as mentioned above is how to address gender equality and gender violence and specifically with regard to cyber violence and how government policies can help achieve gender equality and if they have been successful in the past.

The article pulls information from a variety of scholarly articles on cyber violence against women and other marginalized classes and how the Indonesian government has or can enact policies to empower those women and marginalized classes.  All of the data is pulled from those sourced articles as there is no new research done for the study the article references but rather interpretation of the older data to test the hypothesis and come to a conclusion.

One concept this article has that would be relevant to our lectures so far is that it uses the scientific method to formulate and then test a hypothesis.  This article also would have the concept of psychology from the lectures apply as it attempts to examine what causes people online to harass and otherwise abuse or bully women and other marginalized classes and their motives for same.  Motive would be another concept that is relevant and is from our lectures.

This article discusses the challenges, concerns and contributions of marginalized groups as it seeks to explore what causes women and other LGBTQ+ people to be harassed and bullied online.  One theory is that with the access of more marginalized classes to ICT and internet in Indonesia that these marginalized classes will have a larger voice and hopefully that the technology could be transformative to their daily existence.  That being said the article is very critical of the policies, or lack thereof, from the Indonesian government to curb cyberbullying and online harassment and actually can work against them in some cases because victims can be reported by their attacker for defamation. 

The contribution of the article to society is that it spotlights the plight of women and marginalized classes in the cyberworld and it offers some general guidance to the Indonesian government that could be used by other governments to help women and other marginalized classes be safer from cyber violence in the digital age.  Some suggestions include creating policies to promote gender equality and punish cyber violence against women, and policies that allow freedom of expression without restriction based on race, gender, etc.