A global citizenship for children?
Santi W.E. Soekanto, Contributor, Jakarta
There should really be global citizenship for children -- one that ensures that they get the first call for the resources of the world, regardless of their location and background.
A special United Nations of Children to fight for their interests would also be helpful, even without Nobel Prize laureates at the helm.
A utopia it may be, but why should 12-year-old Sri Wahyuningsih have to drop out of elementary school in order to scavenge for her family, rooting around in garbage in Depok, West Java, while 13-year-old Ulrika Almquist in Stockholm has access to thousands of good library books, good schooling and good food?
Why should 2-year-old Iji of Aceh now have to stay in an orphanage in East Jakarta pining for his parents who "disappeared" and are presumed dead in the conflict zone, while Max in Bristol, UK, gets both of his parents to take him to the well-equipped playground at Brandon Hill?
Why should 3-year-old Dewi in a refugee camp in Poso, Central Sulawesi, who is so undernourished that she looks like a shrunken old woman, be unable to even go to the hospital because of the ongoing armed clashes around her, while Takuya in Tokyo lives in a fortified environment where every child is guaranteed the best hospital care?
A 15-year-old Indonesian maid in Singapore attempting to escape an abusive employer was raped twice -- and may even have contracted syphilis -- by a cab driver that had promised to help her seek shelter. (This took place in 1998 and the driver has since been sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment and 24 strokes of the cane.) If she could, the girl would have preferred to have spent her time the way her counterparts did in the Western world -- working part-time for pocket money and vacationing on the beach.
If possible, thousands of young girls in Indonesian communities would not want to be perceived as marketable assets for families with limited resources. Countless publications have reported how in these cases, parents are paid for the bonded services of their child whether for domestic work, work in the commercial sex industry, or other hazardous work.
Why should the children in Maluku, Papua, Aceh, Central Sulawesi and other places in the 22 Indonesian provinces where the 1.3 million internally displaced people are scattered, have to languish in makeshift tents in refugee camps, when in Jakarta's urban centers children throw away good money at video game arcades?
For that matter, why should children in Afghanistan and Palestine and other part of the world be the first to suffer because of violence they did not start?
Only those at the lower end of the scale feel the gaps of the world.
Such is the case even in Indonesia where some 120 million people are living in or near poverty, as the World Bank recently revealed. Approximately 30 million children under the age of 17 here, in fact, are facing what UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy has described as a "long-term emergency".
In August 1998, she stated in Jakarta that the fate of millions of Indonesian women and children was at stake. Then, "Some four million Indonesian children below the age of two are already severely malnourished and more than 30 percent of the country's children are at risk of failing to complete primary school."
The various loan packages offered by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other lending agencies may not be enough to turn things around. "It will take years for Indonesia to recover," she stated, "and sustained international aid is critically important to saving the lives of children.
The world community must do what is necessary to rescue the potential of Indonesian children through good nutrition and schooling that will enable them to participate in the competitive world of the 21st century."
How fortunate for the world population that those children are often the most resilient beings. Life knocks them about and throws one abuse after another at them, yet they grow up into strong adults. The child victims of numerous natural or man-made disasters in the past have grown up to become community leaders -- one does not have to look far to find such people.
One such person that comes to mind is Nani Nurahman Sutoyo, who witnessed the assassination of her general father in the 1965 coup attempt blamed on the now-banned communist party.
She suffered the trauma for decades and yet she grew up strong. She became a psychologist and recently led a movement to "forgive but not forget" the atrocity.
It would be inappropriate, however, to ever take this resilience for granted because, with the progress of time, children are facing even more complicated challenges. According to USAID, there is an increasing worldwide demand for girls in the lucrative industries of sex tourism, commercial sex, cheap sweatshop labor, and cheap and compliant domestic workers.
In Indonesia, there is demand nationwide and in well-known tourist and entertainment areas (i.e., Bali and the Riau Islands) for young girls and women for the commercial sex industry. The demand is also increasing for the cheap labor of Indonesian women and girls in the Middle East.
There is also an increased demand for ever-younger (and thus disease-free) Indonesian sex and entertainment workers in nearby Singapore and Malaysia, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Currently, it appears that organized trafficking networks of Indonesian and Chinese-Indonesians is a large and very lucrative business venture involving low risks. Koalisi Perempuan, a woman's group, estimates that as many as 150,000 Indonesian women and children are trafficked internationally per year.
In many cases, the girls' youth and virginity are sold at a price cheaper than the price of a goat.
It is a good thing that Indonesian lawmakers are now working on the child protection bill that would detail the obligations of parents, families, community and the government toward children. The suffering of countless children both here and elsewhere, however, tells us that the responsibility rests with every one of us across states and borders.