Teenager enters prostitution to support family

Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Just call her Lina. She looked like any other teenager despite the heavy make up that gave her the appearance of a 25-year-old. Smiling a lot, the girl seemed to enjoy her life.

You would never imagine that Lina, 16, was a victim of people trafficking. Lina herself does not consider herself a victim and she even looks happy with her job as a prostitute in the Blok M area, South Jakarta.

"This has become my destiny," Lina told The Jakarta Post in a dangdut discotheque late last month.

Three years ago she was a fifth grade elementary school student in a poor village in Indramayu, West Java.

"I just arrived home from school when my dad told me that he had accepted a man's proposal to marry me," said Lina, who has three younger siblings.

So, Lina got married -- and divorced seven months later because "we always quarreled". Back in her parents' home, Lina had to work as a laborer in a ricefield, just like her parents and other villagers.

But while her parents made only Rp 5,000 a day for both of them, she earned much less.

Several months later, her parents ordered her to become a housemaid in the town of Indramayu. Lina said her parents had received Rp 500,000 from a neighbor who had offered the job.

The neighbor took the girl to Indramayu, where she met several other girls. They were then delivered to a man, who put them in a house.

All together, there were over 10 women in the building. She later realized that she had been hired as a prostitute. Lina said the man, whom they called Papi (Daddy), warned them not to disobey him.

"He said he had bought us. If we wanted to go, we had to pay," she said.

The money Papi had spent to buy her was considered a debt that the girl had to pay if she wanted to leave.

"At first, I always thought that I was dirty. However, I could make money to support my family," she said, adding that working as a prostitute was not easy because their pimps and hoodlums would abuse them if they disobeyed their orders.

She had been working for a year when she returned home. In the village, she met some old friends.

"They looked like modern girls and they wore golden jewelry. They asked me to follow them to Jakarta to work in cafes," Lina said. She said her parents urged her to go.

She left for Jakarta last year, after paying off her debt to Papi.

When she arrived in the city, one of her friends took her to a shabby nightclub in Mangga Besar, West Jakarta.

Later, she found out that her friend had sold her to her pimp for Rp 600,000.

"I didn't know what to say. She used me," Lina said.

As a prostitute, she said she could make Rp 50,000 from one client. Several months later, Lina was allowed to leave after she paid the pimp over Rp 1 million.

That was six months ago.

Today, she still works as a prostitute, but without a pimp.

"It's better this way, I can choose my customers," she said.

Asked if she had any plans to quit her job, she said "Someday I will, but now, it is the only thing I can do to support my family."