Criminogenic Silence: Rethinking Structural Indifference as a State Crime by Omission in Indonesia’s Digital Governance Crisis

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.