On 'human trafficking'

In The Jakarta Post's Sept. 30 edition it was reported that Indonesian lawmakers are contemplating tougher laws for ""human trafficking"". They are addressing the symptoms rather than the disease.

In most developed countries trafficking of their citizens is uncommon, due to their expansive education systems and the strength of their economies to absorb new workers. However, many emerging market countries, including Indonesia, are struggling to provide jobs and careers for their young adults. This may be due to a) their high birthrates, which produce a disproportionate number of unskilled new entrants to the labor forces; and b) the low educational standards of those economies which ill-prepare young people in a competitive global economy.

Even now, thousands of young Indonesian women are seemingly forced to seek serf-like employment as maids in the Middle East and other Asian countries. For many of them, the long work hours, uncertainty of compensation and exposure to sexual assault, together with separation from their families, are a very dismal alternative to poverty in their home country.

Indonesian lawmakers should look at the root causes of high unemployment and address these causes. This was identified by Professor Nathanael Iskandar of the University of Indonesia back in 1973 in a paper to the Seminar on Demographic Research for the Committee for International Coordination of National Research In Demography, wherein he identified the risk to Indonesia from the upsurge in population caused by a high birthrate against a simultaneously rapidly declining death rate (due to improved medical care and nutrition).

More than 30 years later, nothing has been done. By lowering the birthrate, the country could focus its education budget on a smaller student population and improve the quality of its education, thereby extending the duration of students in the education system and reducing the pressure on them to seek unskilled work as maids or worse being the victims of the sex industry of foreign countries.

T. COTTON
Jakarta