Jakarta street kids abused and neglected

The following articles were written for The Jakarta Post in conjunction with this year's National Children Day. The author, Natalie Jette, is a Canadian and a founding member of PEKAT, an organization working for the economic empowerment of marginalized children in Indonesia. Jette lives in Jakarta and can be contacted at pekat_indo@yahoo.ca.

Two years ago I moved to Indonesia to work for a Canadian engineering company in Jakarta. Shocked and disgusted by the condition of the children in this city, I left my job to join an organization determined to do something about this crisis.

For the past year I have lived together with these children in their communities. I have witnessed remarkable struggles of survival pitted against a heinous international system that exploits these children and then profits from their suffering.

Their stories are both a cry for help and call to arms for those of us fortunate enough to be in a position where we can do something about it.

The first time I saw Heri he was lying alone and unconscious in a hospital bed. The 12-year-old was thrown from the roof of a train when his arm struck the 25,000-volt electric wire running above the tracks. He was rushed to the hospital by a group of his friends.

After several weeks in the hospital the doctors amputated his left hand and released him, knowing he had no money for the drugs he needed. Two weeks later his arm was so infected it required another amputation, this time up to the elbow, plus three fingers from his remaining hand.

Some of the other street children stole his amputated hand out of the operating room and kept it in a glass jar for months. The enormous piece of charred flesh bore no resemblance to a hand, but Heri became a temporary celebrity and his former hand a cherished symbol of the struggle of these kids against a government that does not seem to care whether they live or die.

By the time Heri's ordeal was finally over, he was so traumatized that for weeks he didn't speak. He was too ashamed of his appearance to face his friends, and preferred to spend his time alone. He refused all charity offered to him. Eventually, he just sort of disappeared.

Born into severe poverty, many children like Heri are forced to leave their families when their basic needs cannot be met. Children as young as six travel thousands of miles alone, making their way to Jakarta with literally nothing but the shirt on their back.

Today, Jakarta is home to over 40,000 of these street children, most of whom drink, smoke, take drugs and sniff glue on a daily basis.

Many children are already addicted to Aibon glue, even after seeing their friends drop dead from its use. They say they do it because it numbs them and makes it easier to face the constant feelings of hunger and loneliness. They have nothing to live for but each other, but somehow, together, they press on.

In another corner of the city, Dian waits for her first customer of the evening. At 14, she's already a professional -- working 12-hour nights in East Jakarta's notorious public park.

Dian and her friends work all night, sleep in the afternoon, and then go back to work again. Most of their customers are Army members. A constant supply of drugs and alcohol keeps them wired throughout the night, and severely depressed during the few hours of daylight they see.

This is a community of children where permanent smiles mask a culture of substance abuse, self-mutilation and chronic depression.

Why is Dian there? She's a very gifted child -- bright, talented and engaging. However, this child has a mother, a father and seven younger brothers and sisters to support back in her village. She wasn't abducted from her village, and she's not a prisoner of her pimp. She's there because, at age 14, she is responsible for the survival of her family, with the US$30 a month that she gives them all that they have.

One of her roommates is a girl named Reni. At 16, Reni is already a divorcee and paying a heavy price for her failed marriage. Social stigma and the need to provide for her parents drew Reni to Jakarta in search of work.

As a divorced woman with a primary school education and no work experience, her employment opportunities (and future marriage prospects) were bleak. Indonesian law sealed Reni's fate with legislation stating that anyone who has ever been married is no longer a child under the law, and is therefore not permitted to enter or reenter the school system.

So, Reni joined her friend Dian in the darkness of the park where she has worked for over a year now.

The park is dangerous, filled with drug addicts and armed criminals. But the biggest threat comes from the law enforcement officers. Police raid the park almost every night, chasing the children with batons and arresting them.

The pimps are conveniently left alone, and later make their way to the police station to pay Rp 50,000 for the release of each girl. The children are terrified of the police. Not only for the raids, but the children also fear being gang-raped by police officers patrolling the park. For the children who work in this park, the law has come to represent nothing more than an instrument of abuse and indignity.

There are other children in the Indonesian sex industry even more ill-fated than Reni and Dian. These are the thousands of girls living as prisoners in high-rise dumps serving as centers for child prostitution, gambling and other crooked business activities.

One night, with the help of a friend who is male and Indonesian, I was able to enter one of these brothels. We were led through endless rows of beds and mats with girls, some looking no more than 8 years old, just waiting to be picked out by a customer.

There were rats everywhere, and blacklists on the walls with names of girls who had escaped, or perhaps just disappeared.

Military vehicles packed with armed soldiers patrol these complexes every night. They circle around the buildings protecting the businesses, defending the public interest. In this place, little girls are turned into goods, commodities in a monstrous industry where corrupt individuals in their own government are serious players, and where outsiders are too afraid of the potential consequences to risk getting involved.

The stories of the children I have come to know are far from unique.

Child labor in Indonesia is estimated to affect as many as 10 million children, with almost two million street children and 400,000 child sex workers. According to UNICEF, the increasing number of these children threatens to create a "lost generation" of Indonesians.

How did millions of Indonesian children end up being labeled a future lost generation? Indonesia has already ratified all the UN Conventions -- the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women and numerous International Labor Organization conventions regulating and prohibiting many forms of child labor. Unfortunately, these pieces of paper signed at high-profile international conventions have not amounted to much for the half of the population currently living below the poverty line, and all of their children.

Two months ago world leaders gathered once again on behalf of the Dians, Renis and Heris of the world -- this time at the UN Special Session on Children in New York. UNICEF executive director Carol Bellamy praised the hard work of the participating governments during the three-day fanfare: "We have a document the world and its children can be proud of."

The Indonesian representative, Minister of Health Achmad Sujudi, expressed his country's unwavering commitment to its children, and listed all of the UN Conventions and Protocols that his government had signed since the last time the international community gathered on behalf of children (10 years ago at the World Summit for Children). Congratulations were had all around, and then everybody went home, knowing that it doesn't really matter.