Harsher law vital to curb women, child trafficking
M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
An international organization asked the Indonesian government on Monday to make the law on child trafficking harsher as the existing laws were considered inadequate to protect those who fell prey to traffickers and too lenient against child traffickers.
A representative from the Geneva-based International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC), Ruth Rosenberg, said the absence of a clear-cut definition of child trafficking in the country's laws has hampered law enforcers in efforts to eliminate the practice.
"There is no definition of trafficking in any of the existing laws. The result of that is that many criminal acts that could be considered trafficking by international definition based on the UN Protocol on Women and Child Trafficking, could not be punished under Indonesian law," she told The Jakarta Post and Tempo weekly.
She was quick to add that under the existing law victims and witnesses in child trafficking cases were not provided protection. "Apart from the fact that the punishment for traffickers is too lenient, there is also no compensation for the victims, who have been poorly paid and worked overtime during their stints as domestic helpers," Ruth said.
Although Indonesia has ratified the International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention No. 182 on the eradication of the worst forms of child labor, translated into Law No. 1/2000 and Law No. 23/2003 on labor protection that stipulates the minimum age for children to work, there is no mention of child trafficking.
With regards women and child trafficking, Indonesia, until only recently, has been classified as a second tier country, meaning that it has the awareness but is not yet implementing the laws. Earlier, the country was categorized as a third tier country, which means that it was deemed as having no awareness of the problem and virtually no law enforcement against women and child trafficking.
State Minister for Women's Empowerment Sri Redjeki Sumaryoto earlier said that her office was preparing a bill on eradicating women and child trafficking, which would soon be submitted to the House of Representatives for endorsement.
A researcher from the Center for Societal Development Studies of Atma Jaya University, Syarief Darmoyo, said that apart from leniency in the existing laws, the lack of awareness of families had also greatly contributed to the perpetuation of child trafficking.
"During my six-month research in rural regions of West and Central Java, I found that those who trafficked girls from their home villages to Jakarta and other major cities were in fact acquaintances, neighbors and even close relatives," he told a seminar on child trafficking.
He said that such a practice stemmed from poverty that had afflicted most of families in a number of resource-poor regions.
Syarief also underlined that children who had been trafficked and worked in big cities like Jakarta were prone to exploitation from their employers. "In a number of cases, we found that they were like hostages, their ID card and salary were withheld, so that they would remain with the households that employed them," he said.
Given the magnitude of children employed as domestic helpers, he called on the government to draft a law on women and child trafficking that would touch on the issue.