The flesh trade goes on and on...

Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Her earrings flashed, illuminated by the light of the room. She threw back her head and laughed.

"I'm still a virgin you know," the 13-year-old coyly said. "I let them touch and kiss me but I always refuse to be taken to a motel."

Meet Reny, a native of Patrol village, Sukra district in Indramayu, West Java. In Jakarta, she sells bottled tea at the National Monument area in Central Jakarta and provides "extra services" to make up for the inflated price of the tea she charges.

"Customers can touch me, kiss me, fondle my breasts ... I get Rp 1,000 for every bottle I sell," Reny said.

She may be young in years, but certainly not in the ways of the world. With experience of a little over a year, Reny already knows every trick of the trade and knows just when to stop and what to do when a client gets too fresh.

Reny claims she is still a virgin. For how long? Who knows.

Reny is just one of the thousands of children employed in the flesh trade, young girls taken away from their village and families to satisfy the primal instincts of man.

Data from the Office of the State Minister for Women's Empowerment in 2001 cited that about 30 percent, or 49,500 children, of the total number of sex workers in the country were children below the age of 18 years old.

"But since many sex workers work at hidden and unregistered places, the real figure may be even higher," said the International Labor Organization (ILO) Jakarta's officer in charge Mukda Sunkool in a public dialog.

Human trafficking is nothing new, in fact it has become the fastest growing business of organized crime, with more than 700,000 people trafficked worldwide each year for sexual exploitation and forced labor, according to the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UN-ODCCP).

Child labor, too, is not unusual.

There were many instances where children are "encouraged" to help their parents supplement the family's income. In most cases, many children are forced to work beyond the capacity of their age and strength, turning it into exploitation, doing the kind of work they should never have been exposed to.

According to ILO, the exploitation of child labor is work performed by a child, who is under a minimum age specified in the national legislation for that kind of work.

A job is hazardous when it jeopardizes the physical, mental or moral well-being of a child; while the unconditional worst form of child labor is internationally defined as work such as slavery, trafficking, debt bondage and other forms of forced labor, forced recruitment for use in armed conflict, prostitution and pornography and illicit activities.

In Indonesia -- in compliance with the ILO Convention No. 138 on minimum age for admission to employment -- the law stipulates the general minimum age for employment is 15 years old, for dangerous work including prostitution 18 years old and for light work 13 years old.

The 1998 economic crisis was one of the main triggers for increased child labor. The crisis has caused many manufacturing industries to lay off workers, forcing women and children to help supplement the family income with whatever work they can find.

This makes the lure of big cities irresistible and promises of descent work and wages too good to pass up. Unfortunately, instead of decent work, many find themselves enslaved in a trade that they have no control over -- the trade of their bodies.

"I was told that I would be a salesgirl in a store in Jakarta. Instead, it was to sell bottled tea in Monas," Dede, 17, from Subang, West Java related. She has been in Jakarta since 2000.

Often the people that send these girls to their terrible fates are those closest to them -- a trusted village elder, friends of the family and even their immediate families.

"My village chief sent me to Jakarta to work," said Reny, who only has an elementary school certificate.

However, poverty is not the only trigger for the rife practices of child trafficking and labor. A tradition of early marriage among certain communities also plays a significant role, according to a sociologist from Atma Jaya University, Irwanto.

"Many young girls are forced to drop out of school to get married and in consequence, the rate of divorce in places such as Indramayu is especially high," he said.

A researcher from survey agency DKT Indonesia, Teguh Budiono, puts the number of marriages in Indramayu at 20,600 marriages in 2000, with more than 5,000 divorces during the same year.

Irwanto said that when a girl marries, she is automatically considered an adult and loses her rights as a child of the family.

"So when she divorces, her family has no obligation to finance her life. Without education she will take any kind of job offered, including being a sex worker," he said.

Dede has already gone through one divorce and has an 18-month- old baby boy.

"I can't get out because I don't have any money. Everything is so expensive here (Jakarta) so I have to sell my body so my child can eat," she said, adding that she is wise enough to always use a condom to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.

The problem goes on and on, and in response to the ILO's international program on the elimination of child labor (IPEC), the government will launch a 20-year national plan initially aimed at the eradication of child labor in offshore rigs and deep sea fishing, child prostitution, mining, the footware industry, and drug trafficking.

The launching of the program is pending the signing of a presidential decree by President Megawati Soekarnoputri.