Over the weekend, 10 women accused of being lesbians were arrested in West Sumatra, after a police trawl of Facebook threw up pictures of two of them kissing and hugging.

And last month, police in Bandung, the capital of Indonesia’s West Java province, raided the private home of two men and arrested them for allegedly running a Facebook group for same-sex couples. Police confiscated mobile phones and condoms during the raid and said the men would be charged for distributing indecent material on the internet.

This may seem absurd and abusive for a country that touts a motto of “unity in diversity” and has had lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT+) rights groups operating since the 1980s. But these arrests are nothing new in Indonesia – far from it.

In October, government officials in various regencies of West Java – the country’s most populous province, with more than 46 million people – publicly called for policies that would target LGBT+ people for arrest and “rehabilitation”.

Local decrees propose handing over lists of allegedly gay and bisexual men to authorities, changing school curricula to teach falsehoods about and hatred of LGBT+ people, subjecting gay and trans people to medical intervention to change their sexual orientation or gender identity, censoring speech about their rights, and other measures supposedly to combat the “LGBT+ threat”.

When queried on the matter of gay and trans people and organisations in the province, Governor Ridwan Kamil said he wanted to “eradicate such things”.

The arrests form part of a larger national trend. Read more via Reuters