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ational Children'€™s Day, which fell on Wednesday, may have been observed quietly across much of the nation, but a number of communities in Bandung, West Java, celebrated it by holding a discussion to express their hopes for a better future for children.

The West Java Children'€™s Forum called on president-elect Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo and vice president-elect Jusuf Kalla to make Indonesia a child-friendly country, during an event to observe the national day in Bandung on Wednesday.

'€œThere has to be equality in children'€™s rights, without discrimination,'€ forum coordinator Berlinda Nevertiti, 18, said during the event. She described a child-friendly state as an administrative entity
capable of fulfilling a child'€™s basic rights, including the right to grow, to be protected and to participate.

M. Zaky Raihanullah, another member of the forum, said the biggest challenges in Bandung in terms of fulfilling children'€™s rights were unequal access to education and the city'€™s high number of street children. He blamed the situation on economic disparity in the community.

He said he was concerned about the raids that have been used to deal with the issue of street children.

'€œIt'€™s not a decent approach. Children need to be protected instead of being raided,'€ Zaky, who is a student of the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), said.

Siti Febriyanti Fatimah, 18, a former street child who will study at the Indonesian College of the Arts this year, expressed the same view, saying that raids caused trauma for street children.

'€œIt would be better if the government focused on empowering our parents,'€ she said.

Meanwhile, teachers and activists in East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) say many children in the province are struggling with the impacts of living without their parents, who left their hometowns to earn a living abroad as migrant workers.

They said many children were prone to psychological distress and vulnerable to violence due to poverty.

Sergius Idul, a teacher at Waemokel junior high school, East Manggarai, said that a number of his students in the third grade often discussed how they missed their absent parents.

He said they often refused to attend school unless their mothers or fathers returned home from working in Malaysia.

'€œI constantly try to support them with advice and encouragement to keep them coming back to school,'€ Sergius told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

Katarina Supatmiyati, the head of the Greater Manggarai Migration Community (KMMR), an NGO assisting migrant workers, said scores of children in the three regions of Greater Manggarai '€” West Manggarai, Manggarai and East Manggarai '€” have been left by parents who are working in Malaysia.

She said her organization often encountered problems related to abandoned children who were left in the care of neighbors or relatives in their villages.

She added that many of the children were unable to pay their school fees because they did not receive enough money in time. She was also concerned about their health, as they depended on the former healthcare program (Jamkesmas).

Her organization, she said, cooperated with other NGOs concerned with children, such as Wahana Visi Indonesia (WVI), by establishing childcare groups to control violence against children both at school and home.

'€œMothers whose husbands work abroad sometimes commit physical violence against their children,'€ she said.

Greater Manggarai women'€™s rights activist Maria M. Hadiani said that volunteers and social workers were needed to help control the spread of violence against children by disseminating information in villages about the rights of children.

According to 2010 data from the NTT branch of the government-run Community Service Center for the Protection of Women and Children (P2TP2A), of the 44 of 132 cases handled involved violence against children.

The NTT Social Affairs Agency also recorded that from 2010 to 2013, there were 67,310 cases of abandoned children in the province.