Mobs of up to 20 people are chasing, beating, stripping, and throwing bottles of urine at transgender women in Bogor, Indonesia, while the local police chief hasn't bothered to return a single press call. The attacks have been escalating for two weeks, filmed on video that's now gone viral, and the women being targeted earn as little as 20,000 Indonesian rupiah per night. That's about a dollar twenty. This is what a state-sponsored moral panic looks like when it hits the street.
What's actually happening in Bogor
BBC News Indonesia broke the details this week after speaking with a transgender woman who survived one of the attacks and agreed to talk only without her identity published, for her own safety. She told the outlet she has been facing persecution from groups of people since early July, and that the violence has grown more intense in the past several days.
She fought back during one attack. "I suffered physical injuries yesterday because I resisted," she said, according to BBC News Indonesia. "My hand is a bit swollen. I don't want to be hurt for nothing, especially because of their uncivilized behavior." That's someone describing mob violence against her with more composure than most of us could manage.
According to Arisdo Gonzalez, an LGBTQ rights advocate with the organization Pelangi Nusantara, attacks have taken place in at least three different locations across Bogor in the past two weeks. The targets are transgender sex workers, women who are visible and in public spaces precisely because street-based sex work is one of the only ways they can earn income in a society that has largely shut every other door in their faces.
The mobs are growing and the weapons are getting worse
Arisdo told BBC News Indonesia that what started as one or two harassers has ballooned into coordinated mob violence. "Before, they just shouted slurs, the perpetrators didn't dare to commit persecution, but now it's fiercer," he said. Groups that were once small enough to ignore are now showing up five, ten, sometimes twenty people at a time.
The methods have escalated too. Arisdo described perpetrators throwing urine, stripping transgender women in public, chasing them for long distances, beating them with bottles, throwing concrete blocks, and brandishing machetes. One survivor told BBC News Indonesia that on July 15th she was attacked by at least 20 people who swarmed and pursued her.
"We all want to be safe, not to be disturbed," she said. "I hope the police regularly patrol those places." The police have not commented. BBC News Indonesia says they requested a response from Bogor Police Chief AKBP Wikha Ardilestanto and received nothing before publication.
This didn't come from nowhere, it came from the government
Here's the thing about this violence: it did not spontaneously generate from random street thugs. A July 10th investigation by BBC News Indonesia cited research from academics at Monash University Indonesia finding that the anti-LGBTQ campaign driving this atmosphere is institutional in nature, pushed by state policy actors. This is organized. It has backing.
Indonesia's government issued a presidential regulation earlier this month classifying LGBTQ people as a national security threat. The Lieutenant Governor of West Java, Erwan Setiawan, announced on July 12th that any civil servants found to be LGBTQ would be fired. "We have declared war on LGBT in West Java," he said, per BBC News Indonesia. That's not ambiguous language. That is a senior government official telling his province that a group of people are enemies.
On June 21st, the provincial government of West Sumatra, along with its regional police force, held a formal anti-LGBTQ declaration ceremony. The traditional Minangkabau council co-signed it. This is the official architecture of persecution. The mobs in Bogor are just the implementation.
The local ordinance that made all of this legal to hate
Bogor has had a local regulation on the books since 2021 explicitly categorizing LGBTQ people as engaging in "deviant sexual behavior." Article 6 of that ordinance uses exactly that language. When your city government writes slurs into law, you don't get to act surprised when people start treating the targets of that law like they're subhuman.
The Mayor of Bogor, Dedie Rachim, offered something that can charitably be described as a lukewarm non-response. He told Tribunnews that the mob attacks might constitute "taking the law into their own hands," which could be illegal, and suggested that communities, religious leaders, and families should guide people through "proper channels" instead. What those proper channels are supposed to look like for women being chased through the streets by machete-waving crowds, he did not specify.
Nowhere in Indonesia feels safe right now
Arisdo told BBC News Indonesia that transgender communities in other cities are watching Bogor and feeling the fear ripple outward. "In West Java there is quite a high risk, and also in cities like Padang," he said.
Arisdo made one point about the economics of this that deserves to sit uncomfortably in your head for a moment. He described visiting a group of transgender sex workers and asking how much they earn. One told him 20,000 rupiah, roughly equivalent to a dollar. "It's that hard for them to make money, and now they're being targeted for persecution," he said. "I am very, very concerned."
These are some of the most economically and socially marginalized people in Indonesia, surviving on almost nothing, with no institutional protection, no legal standing worth the paper it's printed on, and now an organized mob campaign backed implicitly by state rhetoric hunting them in the streets. The regional risk assessment is grim. The federal government is not stepping in. And the cops aren't returning calls.
Indonesian Antifa is calling people to fight back
Not everyone in Indonesia is waiting for the government to grow a conscience. Indonesian Antifa posted a call to action on their Instagram directed at anti-authoritarian networks across the country, and it does not read like a strongly worded letter to a local council.
The statement lays out three demands. The first is that Presidential Regulation Number 111 of 2025, the one classifying LGBTQ people as a national security threat, be revoked, along with every regional anti-LGBTQ ordinance that has been weaponized against queer communities. The second is the formation of what they describe as "defense units" to directly confront and counter mob violence through what they call "confrontation and direct action." The third is a call for anti-authoritarian organizations to become active allies to LGBTQ individuals and movements across their respective regions.
That's a straightforward program: repeal the laws, form the units, show up for the people being targeted. Whether the networks respond, and in what numbers, remains to be seen. But when the police chief won't return a press call and the mayor is suggesting religious guidance as a solution to machete mobs, the fact that anyone is issuing a coherent call to organize is at minimum worth knowing about.
The Dingo Take
Let's be precise about what's happening here, because precision matters. This is not a spontaneous outbreak of social tension. This is a government-incubated pogrom against people who earn a dollar a night selling sex because every other economic option has been closed to them by the same society now sending mobs to strip them in public. Indonesia's presidential administration classified their existence as a national security threat. A provincial governor declared war on them. A regional police force co-hosted a ceremony to formalize their exclusion. And then someone acts shocked when the street mobs start showing up with machetes and bottles of urine.
The mayor of Bogor suggested religious education and family guidance as the solution. The police chief didn't even pick up the phone. The women being targeted are asking, politely, for regular patrols in the areas where they work. That is an extraordinarily modest request from people being hunted. They're not asking for anything revolutionary. They're asking to exist in public without being chased. Into that vacuum, Indonesian Antifa is calling for defense units and direct action. Draw your own conclusions about what it means when the only people willing to offer protection are the ones organizing outside any official structure.
If you need a historical comparison, the mechanics are not complicated to find. State actors prime a population with institutional hatred, law gets written to dehumanize a group, local enforcement looks the other way, and then the violence gets outsourced to whoever shows up with a crowd. Every step of that sequence is present and documented here. The only question is how much worse it gets before anyone with actual power in Indonesia decides that letting mobs terrorize the poorest people in their cities is, in fact, a problem worth their time.
