Screenshots of a conversation between 16 male students at the University of Indonesia were posted on social media this week, eliciting shock and anger from female peers and a wider societal discussion.

The university said in a statement Thursday it had suspended the young men for two weeks pending an investigation.

“This step was taken as part of the university’s commitment to… maintaining a conducive academic environment,” spokesman Erwin Agustian Panigoro said in a statement.

The students are accused of having made vulgar and explicit sexual jokes about female peers and lecturers.

One message read “silence means consent”, suggesting that women who don’t verbally refuse a sexual advance are implicitly agreeing to sex.

Days later, a group of women students at the university berated the men in a public forum.

A video of the confrontation, in which the accused men stare at their feet as they are chewed out by women who said they were made to feel unsafe, also went viral.

The university student body is demanding the men be brought before an ethics board and given strict sanctions.

The incident has triggered a public debate about verbal sexual abuse and harassment, often brushed off as inconsequential in conservative Indonesia.

More than a quarter of women in the country reported having experienced gender-based violence, according to the latest survey of the UN Development Program.

The Indonesian Education Monitoring Network or JPPI, an NGO, said it has recorded more than 200 cases of violence in education institutions in the past three months countrywide, nearly half involving sexual abuse.

The JPPI is demanding the government declare a state of emergency on violence in education and make it a national priority.

The country passed a law on sexual violence in 2022 that criminalised harassment, including online.