Comparative Legal Study Between Indonesia and The Philippines in Responding to Youth Involvement in Cyber-Enabled Crime from the Perspective of Space Transition Theory

Abstract

Children and adolescents now live substantial parts of their lives in cyberspace, where the benefits of the digital environment are accompanied by rising exposure to cyber-enabled harms — principally cyberbullying and cyber violence, including its sexual forms. This article offers a comparative socio-legal analysis of how Indonesia and the Philippines regulate these harms for youth, employing a normative juridical perspective supported by secondary empirical evidence and read against Space Transition Theory, which attributes online offending to anonymity, identity flexibility, weak deterrence, and movement between physical and virtual settings. It argues that the protective deficit is, in the first instance, structural rather than national: the international regime regulates online harm largely by transposing pre-existing offline offences into the digital domain rather than recognizing natively digital harms, so that sexual cyber-harms against minors are comparatively well covered while non-sexual cyber violence survives only as soft-law aspiration or strained analogy, with ASEAN supplying no binding floor. The two jurisdictions inherit this gap differently — Indonesia through dispersed, analogy-dependent instruments lacking an offence-specific definition of cyberbullying, the Philippines through a more integrated but sexual-exploitation-focused framework that treats cyberbullying as a school-administrative matter — while sharing a common implementation deficit and a dual youth victim/offender reality. The article concludes with calibrated recommendations for offence-specific definition, statutory harmonization, coverage of synthetic harms, rehabilitative juvenile justice, and a regional binding instrument.