This article introduces the concept of criminogenic silence to explain why repeated government data breaches in Indonesia between 2020 and 2024 have failed to provoke sustained public outrage. It asks: How and why have these breaches been met with resignation and how can this silence be understood as a form of state crime by omission? Drawing on interviews with civil-society organizations, a focus group discussion, and a qualitative survey of 1,079 respondents, it shows that resignation is not apathy, but a form of adaptation to an unresponsive state. This paper argues that repeated government data breaches constitute a state crime of omission, adopting a hybrid approach: rights-based in recognizing privacy and autonomy violations, and harm-based in tracing the erosion of civic trust and the slow corrosion of belief in state authority. By naming criminogenic silence, this article contributes to a Southern criminology that foregrounds the normalization of digital harm as a form of structural social harm in the Global South.
Irnasya Shafira Hadi (Thu,) studied this question.