Child domestic helpers at risk of abuse: Report
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Hundreds of thousands of young girls employed as domestic helpers in Indonesia are at risk of physical and sexual abuse, much of it due to lack of legal protection from the state.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch said in its latest report unveiled on Monday that the children, aged between 12 and 15 years old, work 14 to 18 hours per day, seven days a week from 4 a.m. to 10 p.m. with employers who often subjected them to physical and sexual threats.
Indonesia enacted child protection laws in 2002 that requires the government to protect children from economic and sexual exploitation.
HRW researcher Sahr Muhammed Ally told a media conference that the Indonesian government had failed to protect young domestic workers from abuse and exploitation in three ways.
"First, government officials at the national and regional level consistently deny the widespread abuse of such workers. Second, Indonesia's national labor laws exclude domestic workers from receiving minimum wages, proper working hours, rest, holidays, an employment contract and social security. Third, there are no effective mechanisms to protect workers in the informal sector, such as access to the police when exploitation occurs," she said.
The 74-page report provides an account of the working conditions of child domestic workers based on 44 interviews with former and current young domestic helpers in Jakarta, Bekasi, Pamulang, Yogyakarta, Semarang, Surabaya and Medan between November to December 2004, with assistance from local non- governmental organizations.
In the report, entitled Always on Call: Abuse and Exploitation of Child Domestic Workers, HRW said some female workers suffered beatings, cigarette burns, hot iron burns and imprisonment. Some beatings even resulted in paralysis and death. Others recounted tales of sexual harassment and of being raped by their employers.
There are 2.6 million domestic workers in Indonesia, 640,000 of whom are under the age of 18, the International Labor Organization (ILO) says.
During the conference, National Commission on Human Rights chairman Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara said that the government was shirking its responsibility to protect children as evident in the inadequate enforcement of regulations on children protection and people's lack of awareness of the issue.
Another panelist, Lita Anggraini of Tjoet Njak Dien, a women's organization, recounted a case in Surabaya as an example of the lack of protection that the law gives to young female domestic helpers.
The Surabaya District Court sentenced an employer to four years in jail in 2001 for violence that left one young household helper dead and four others injured. The employer appealed the conviction and was granted a two-year reduction in the sentence by the provincial court, and was then released on bail by the Supreme Court.
The same employer is now standing trial for another case of abuse of domestic helpers that took place last February.
HRW urged the government to amend existing labor laws in order to provide domestic workers with basic labor rights, such as written contracts, minimum wages, an eight-hour work day, and to strictly enforce the minimum age of 15 for all employment sectors as well as giving child workers access to secondary education.
The rights body also demanded that the government and the House of Representatives take steps to prevent children under 18 from leaving the country to work overseas. (004)