Gambaran Moral Disengagement pada Lesbian di Indonesia

Abstract

The social context of Indonesia, which strongly upholds heteronormativity, places lesbians in a vulnerable position as they are considered to violate religious, cultural, and gender role norms. This pressure creates moral conflict and feelings of guilt, leading to the activation of Albert Bandura’s (2016) concept of moral disengagement as a psychosocial strategy of self-justification to deactivate moral control. This process operates through eight mechanisms: moral justification, euphemistic labeling, palliative comparison, displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, minimizing, ignoring, or misconstruing the consequences, dehumanization, and attribution of blame. A qualitative phenomenological approach was employed to explore the experiences of two lesbian participants selected using the snowball sampling technique. Data were collected through in-depth interviews and analyzed thematically. The findings show that Participant 1 activated all eight mechanisms of moral disengagement, with moral justification and euphemistic labeling being the most prominent. In contrast, Participant 2 did not activate euphemistic labeling but showed stronger activation of palliative comparison and diffusion of responsibility. Overall, the activation of moral disengagement mechanisms was dynamic and adaptive, shifting according to the challenges and pressures encountered during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.