Unlike other parents, many in Indramayu, West Java, see their daughters as economic assets, in line with a local custom known as luruh duit or earning money by working as prostitutes. Most end up in Jakarta’s brothels or places such as Batam and even Japan. This makes the rural regency of Indramayu, along the north coast of West Java, a hotbed for child trafficking. Netherlands-based foundation, Terre des Hommes, accompanied The Jakarta Post’s Prodita Sabarini to Bongas district, a major source of children trafficked into sex work. The following report is published in conjunction with International Anti Human Trafficking Day of Dec. 12 and Woman’s Day of Dec. 22.
Eet Suparti, 19, knows by heart the saying: “Heaven lies under the feet of the mother”.
But for her, there is tension between respecting and obeying a mother that sends her daughter into prostitution. One by one, the high school senior has seen her friends drop out of school to work as sex workers in the capital.
“When parents ask us to work, we should obey them, but the work should be reasonable. For people my age, it’s still common for us to stay at school,” she said.
Eet had just participated in a play that depicted child trafficking to mark Anti-Human Trafficking Day on Dec.12.
There is no clear figure on how many child prostitutes are sent to brothels across the country each year. Wisnu Prasadja, an activist from the Kusuma Buana Foundation, an NGO that deals with trafficking, believes that 10 out of 33 districts in Indramayu regency are hotbeds of child trafficking.
A 2006 survey conducted in Bongas showed that more than 260 people from the district worked as sex workers. In the 1990s, 90 percent or 2,250 of the sex workers in the now defunct official red light district in Kramat Tunggak were from Indramayu, Wisnu said.
“Some 50 percent were elementary school graduates and were children.”
He added that in 2008, the Batam administration announced that from the 6,400 Batam residents that originated from Indramayu, 5,000 were sex workers.
Nono Taryono, a former trafficker who now works as a field officer for the Kusuma Bongas Foundation, said that in Indramayu, sending teenage girls to work as prostitutes was in accordance with local custom.
Wisnu said the community saw the luruh duit practice as act of filial piety, which was established in the 1960s and had been carried through the generations.
Low levels of education and employment, poverty, and a high level of consumerism were responsible for young women in the regency becoming prostitutes, Nono said.
The villages in Indramayu are hot and dusty with wide rice fields next to the long and winding Pantura trail. Jobs are scarce except for laboring on the rice paddies. Brick houses stand side by side with old rattan-walled cottages.
The image of the brick houses and women returning home from big cities with cellular phones and highlighted hair created jealousy among the community, which in the end triggered parents to send their children to work.
Wisnu said that sometimes girls under 18 years old voluntarily sought work with traffickers after seeing their friends and neighbors “succeed”.
“But despite some children voluntarily seeking work, it is still child trafficking because they are underage,” Wisnu said.
Traffickers, popularly called sponsors, channels, or middlemen are aplenty in the villages.
Traffickers also transport the girls to pimps in big cities where they receive a 1-percent cut for each girl
For example, a sex worker in Mangga Besar can receive Rp 600,000 per night. Some 60 percent of that payment will go to the pimp, 39 percent to the sex worker and one percent to the trafficker.
Nono said that virgins were more expensive and that parents sold their virgin daughters for between Rp 3 and 8 million.
According to Nyoman from the Bongas Police’s chief of detectives unit, there were four arrests in
relation to trafficking cases in Bongas last year. Three traffickers were sentenced to between nine and 18 months in prison under the child protection law.
In 2007, the House of Representatives passed a human trafficking law that makes each person involved in trafficking legally culpable, from the seller — parents or relatives, to traffickers, employers and customers.
However, Nyoman said that it had been difficult to take action because the parents were the ones selling their children.
Once a child was rescued and returned to their parents, the latter would only send them back to work, he said.
“How can we stop people from selling their children?” he asked.
Syarief, the coordinator of Kusuma Bongas Foundation said that even the threat of contracting HIV and AIDS from unprotected sex only affected small number of people.
“Some people are scared of the disease, but others think that death is a natural thing,” he said.
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