Digital Incest Narratives and Child Protection: Addressing Regulatory Gaps through Legal and Islamic Normative Reconstruction

Abstrak

The circulation of incest fantasy narratives in digital media presents emerging challenges for child protection, particularly because such content often falls outside existing explicitness-based regulatory frameworks. While national child protection laws, cybercrime regulations, and international legal instruments primarily address explicit child sexual exploitation material, non-explicit incest narratives remain insufficiently regulated despite their potential to contribute to cultural normalization and boundary desensitization in digital environments. This study aims to examine how legal, ethical, and Islamic normative frameworks may be integrated to address the regulatory gap concerning non-explicit incest narratives in digital media and to strengthen preventive child protection in the digital era. This article adopts a normative juridical method employing statutory, conceptual, and Islamic legal approaches. It positions itself as a normatively critical and reconstructive study aimed at expanding the legal understanding of digital sexual harm beyond explicit material. The study argues that Islamic normative principles, particularly the protection of lineage (ḥifẓ al-nasl) and human dignity (ḥifẓ al-‘irḍ), can be reconstructed as a preventive legal framework to address symbolic and anticipatory forms of harm. The study demonstrates that non-explicit incest narratives may produce cumulative and symbolic forms of harm that are insufficiently addressed within explicitness-based legal frameworks. By integrating legal analysis, digital ethics, and maqāṣid al-sharīʿah particularly the principles of ḥifẓ al-nasl and ḥifẓ al-‘irḍ, this research offers a preventive and proportionate framework for understanding child protection in digitally mediated environments. The findings contribute to contemporary debates on digital governance by developing a risk-based approach to non-explicit sexual harm that remains consistent with principles of legality, proportionality, and freedom of expression.