Re-conceptualizing Child Victim Rights: A Normative and Comparative Analysis of Victim Impact Statement in Indonesia’s Juvenile Justice System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Indonesia, the participation of child victims in criminal proceedings remains highly constrained. Courtroom questioning still centers on extracting material facts, while the psychological, emotional, and developmental harm inflicted by crime receives scant judicial attention. This article analyzes whether embedding Victim Impact Statements (VIS) in juvenile proceedings could correct that imbalance. Using a normative‑juridical methodology that combines statutory interpretation, doctrinal analysis, and comparative research, the study reviews VIS implementation in the United States, Canada, England and Wales, and South Africa, and tests its coherence with Indonesia’s Law No. 11 of 2012 on the Juvenile Criminal Justice System (JCJS Law). The comparative findings demonstrate that VIS offer a structured, low‑cost channel for children and their guardians to describe the multidimensional fallout of crime, thereby enriching judges’ sentencing rationales and promoting restorative outcomes. Evaluations in those jurisdictions also show that VIS boost victim satisfaction and enhance perceived legitimacy of the courts. To harness these benefits, the paper proposes amending the JCJS Law to require judges to solicit and consider VIS in every juvenile case involving a child victim. Procedural safeguards-mandatory psychological assistance, child‑friendly language, closed‑court delivery options, and trauma‑informed questioning are recommended to prevent secondary victimization.Codifying these protections would close a normative gap, align national law with both the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and Sustainable Development Goal 16 on justice, and support Indonesia’s broader commitment to child‑centered jurisprudence. Ultimately, institutionalizing VIS can transform victims from passive evidence providers into active rights holders whose voices shape fair, balanced, and developmentally sensitive judicial decisions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".