<![CDATA[This study examines how the concept of “sexuality” is lexically constructed in Indonesia’s newly enacted penal code, Law No. 1 of 2023 on the Criminal Code (KUHP 2023). It aims to identify (1) the semantic-field organization, (2) the componential and relational structure, and (3) the translation equivalence of ""sexual"-related terminology in the code. The study proceeds from the premise that ambiguity in such terms carries direct consequences for judicial interpretation and enforcement. A qualitative descriptive design was employed, combining document analysis, componential analysis, and a prototype-based lexical framework. Relevant terms were identified through close reading of the full statutory text, including main provisions and elucidatory notes, and recorded according to their article location and syntactic context. Each term was then decomposed into distinctive semantic features covering human involvement, harm, coercion, and consent. Inter-item relations, including hyponymy, near-synonymy, polysemy, and collocation, were subsequently mapped to reveal the terminology's internal architecture. A separate analysis assessed how ten lexically distinct core items are rendered in the published English gloss of the code. The corpus yielded 16 lexical occurrences of 10 distinct lexical items, distributed across 12 articles and the elucidatory notes to two of those articles, organized into five semantic subfields. Violence-denoting terms formed the largest cluster (7 occurrences, 43.75%). Items in the violence and exploitation sub-fields shared a uniform feature profile marking them as harmful, coercive, and non-consensual, while activity- and contact-denoting terms remained feature-ambiguous, occupying a boundary zone between moral regulation and criminal prohibition. One umbrella term, kekerasan seksual (sexual violence), was found to carry three distinguishable senses across different articles, indicating a documented risk of interpretive ambiguity. In translation into English, six of the ten core items (60%) retained full semantic equivalence, three (30%) required structural or register adaptation, and one (10%) showed a genuine semantic shift. The study concludes that terminology forms a largely coherent but unevenly precise system: it offers a linguistic basis, not a substitute for judicial clarification and legislative drafting. It further identifies specific points, notably the ambiguous consent-marking of activity/contact terms, where further legal-linguistic attention is warranted.]]>
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