The flesh trade goes on and on...
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.