Australia's Child Wise regrets Bali child abuse document
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The head of Australia's leading child protection advocacy group said she wished she had never made public a report on pedophiles in Bali.
In a recent interview with Australia's The Age newspaper, Child Wise director Bernadette McMenamin said her group's report on pedophiles was a "working document" prepared by a postgraduate student and not "an investigation".
"It's a whole collection of comments, we don't pretend it's any more than that," she told The Age.
The document said that pedophile rings of Australians, Americans and Europeans were operating largely undetected on Bali.
The media, quoting Child Wise, reported that children on Bali's streets had revealed networks of thousands of foreign men preying on them, working together and sharing the children
Child Wise named half a dozen Bali bars where children are allegedly available for sex, but the author did not mention whether she personally visited these bars.
The document was released to some members of the media in November and received no coverage at the time, apparently because the allegations it contains are all unsubstantiated.
"There was no interest in it for obvious reasons," she said.
But the arrest of former Australian diplomat and suspected pedophile William Stuart Brown prompted a flurry of stories quoting the document alleging a big rise in pedophile activities in Bali, especially involving Australians, she said.
She said she had no doubt that pedophiles operated in Bali, but people should realize the problem was worse in many other places in Asia.
"It's probably less of a problem there than in the rest of Indonesia," she said.
Child Wise had just compiled the document with the intention of convincing authorities to probe the allegations.
"We were not there to investigate ... I can't say we have investigated the claims that were given to us," McMenamin said.
Child Wise jointly organized a meeting on the island last month with the Indonesia's Office of the State Minister for Culture and Tourism as part of its effort to fight sexual exploitation of children, particularly in the tourist industry.
The meeting, which was attended by high-level tourism officials and NGOs from Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and the Philippines, adopted a draft of the ASEAN Traveler's Code (ATC).
The ATC urges travelers to "help prevent the abuse and exploitation of people". It also states that "everyone has the right to protection from exploitation and abuse".
Elizabeth O' Neill, the new press attache at the Australian Embassy in Indonesia, told The Jakarta Post Australia had introduced laws to combat child sex tourism.
Australian citizens and residents who engage in sexual activity with children in foreign countries can be prosecuted in Australia under Australia's Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Act 1994, which provides for a prison term of up to 17 years and fines of up to A$500,000.