Project description:

The project is about convicts being tortured by the Indonesian Police in order for them to extract a confession from them. The project shows how often it happens, how hard it is to prove innocence after being convicted, and the potential devastating consequences that it can result in.

Impact reached:

The project rose awareness on the fact that police brutality is commonplace in Indonesia, especially in regional police. After the story was published, a spokesperson for the Indonesian police had promised to reopen several cases thought to have been closed using coerced confessions.

Techniques/technologies used:

The article uses html and jquery in its construction. Data was collated and saved in a JSON file format to be taken using a javascript function. Animation effects are pure css.

What was the hardest part of this project?

The hardest part of this project was cleaning the data. All in all the project had gone through hundreds of victims collected under a four year period. Some of these data featured incomplete fields and forced our team to get back on the ground to complete it. An additional challenge was to accurately portray the story and the experience of the victims in several different stortelling formats, be it as a newsgame or an animated video. Each victim’s story needed to be sensitively handled, especially because some had even resulted in the death of the victim, so we needed to tread carefully to bring their stories to life.

What can others learn from this project?

Others can learn how to show a volume of data in an interesting, non-intimidating way, and how to create different types of experiences in a single article to showcase differing stories and viewpoints in an elegant way.

Project links:

interaktif.tempo.co/proyek/kisah-di-balik-terali-besi/index.html