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So, after a woman was raped and kidnapped by several men in a public minivan last week, what did Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo have to say? He asked women not to wear miniskirts.

The governor also told women: “If you ride on an ojek wearing short pants or a miniskirt, do not sit like a man. If you sit sidesaddle, there will be no problem.”

One of the governor’s duties, of course is to make sure that Jakarta is safe. However, blaming the victim is indeed far easier than offering concrete solutions, which would place more responsibility for action on him.

Some time ago in Berlin, at a recreational area on Lake Wannsee, I had a walk and a swim at a nude beach. If some men with “dirty” minds had seen me then, what would they have done? If some people agree that women wearing short skirts are “inviting,” how about a nude female body?

Fortunately, not all men have such disrespectful minds. At the lake there were many men and women around, all naked, and no one got raped. No one was even harassed. In fact, people were quite polite to each other.

The only time I have ever been sexually harassed was in Indonesia. I was walking home from school, wearing a school-uniform, when a couple of adult men suddenly approached me and decided to utter some sexually explicit words. One of them even touched me.

I was only 11 years old.

I ran home, locked myself in my room and cried, but I was not able to say a thing. Why? One of the causes is people who keep blaming women in such situations. When women get blamed for the crimes that happen to them, they are often too embarrassed to tell others what happened.

Was my case unique? No. I have seen worse. I have met victims of rape who kept blaming themselves for the crime. I have heard about female victims of rape who decided to commit suicide. If you are victims of robbery or theft, people will usually sympathize with you and blame the criminals, but not with this crime. Why? Why, when the victims are predominantly women, do the criminals have more excuses to get away with what they have done?

This does not happen only in Indonesia.

According to a survey by Amnesty International in Britain, 34 percent of Britons believe that women who flirt can be blamed if they are sexually harassed or raped. The survey also showed that women in sexy clothes are seen by many as being partly to blame for rape. However, they do not agree on what is considered “sexy” or what can be defined as “inviting” clothing.

But research has shown that the blameworthiness of provocative clothing is a myth. The vast majority of rapes are planned, and these usually do not depend on female clothing but on opportunities that the rapists might have to commit the crime without being caught.

The victims of rape also range from women, children, elderly people and even men. So, it does not happen only to young, attractive women wearing miniskirts. Indeed, rather than being about sex, rape is more about violence, oppression and disrespect.

In places where women’s rights are not valued as much, sexual harassment and rape are more common, and they are underreported. How many times have you heard about female Indonesian workers having been sexually harassed and/or raped in Saudi Arabia? And remember, in that country, women are required to cover up their whole body.

I once spoke with some of these workers, and one of them told me that there were a lot more unreported rape cases in Saudi Arabia, but that the victims only told their friends for the fear of damage to their reputation. Some may not have told anyone at all, keeping the criminal act entirely to themselves.

As long as we live in a patriarchal society where men are accorded more power than women, rape of women will tend to keep happening. And when officials like the Jakarta governor keep making public statements that blame women, they are not protecting their people at all — they are merely perpetuating inhumane myths.

Last year around this time, the mayor of West Aceh uttered a similar statement, saying that women who wear miniskirts can be blamed for rapes committed against them. This shows how women’s rights are still far from being equal to men’s.

When some complain that Indonesian women’s emancipation has gone too far, I can only laugh. How far has it gone if female rape victims are still being blamed for the crimes committed against them?

Soe Tjen Marching is a composer, writer and winner of the Kelola Foundation’s Hibah Seni award for the performing arts. Her musical drama, “Planet Musika,” will be performed in Surabaya in November.