INDONESIA: Steps Taken To Stop Child Sex Tourism

An activist group against child sex predation has highlighted the urgency of tackling a growing scourge in Indonesia that has long been overlooked by the authorities.

“Child sex tourism is a new and flourishing form of sexual exploitation toward kids in Indonesia,” Mr Ahmad Sofian, the national coordinator of the group End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (Ecpat) Indonesia, said at a press conference in Jakarta yesterday (Dec 23).

He said the commercially facilitated sexual abuse of minors involved some two million children across the globe, half of them in Southeast Asia.

“In Southeast Asia, Indonesia is the main destination for travelling child sex predators after Vietnam and Cambodia,” Mr Sofian said, attributing this to a demographic that skews young — children and young adults account for half of the country’s total population of some 250 million.

Mr Sofian said lax law enforcement against child molesters in Indonesia was a key factor in the growth of child sex tourism, which is part of the multi-billion-dollar global sex tourism industry. He noted that the child protection law in Indonesia, a general act to protect the rights of minors, fails to make it a crime to buy sex from children.

Law enforcement, meanwhile, tends to focus only on cases of sexual assault and the like when tackling child sex abuse, Mr Sofian said. “Law enforcers seem to be ignoring child sex tourism because it involves tourists who bring in revenue for the local economy,” he added.

Research by Ecpat Indonesia, drawing from reports by Interpol, the Australian Federal Police, Unicef and the International Organisation for Migration between 2012 and 2014, identifies Bali, Jakarta, West Java, East Java, Batam, North Sumatra and Lombok as the top six provinces for number of child sex tourism cases.

“These are popular destinations for business or leisure travellers,” Mr Sofian pointed out, adding that the perpetrators included both domestic and foreign tourists, usually affluent.

The same research also highlights the role that taxi drivers play in the chain of child sex tourism, a problem closely linked with poverty, rapid industrialisation and exploding population growth.

“The most convenient means of transportation for these child sex offenders is the taxi,” Ms Mubha Kahar Muang, the president director of Jakarta taxi operator Putra, said at Wednesday’s press conference.

“Taxi drivers know the very heart of the city and they’ve unfortunately become a sort of informant for child sex predators who are on the hunt,” she added.

That’s why, she said, Putra has joined forces with Ecpat on a campaign aimed at eradicating child sex tourism in Indonesia.

In June and July, Ecpat trained some 250 Putra taxi drivers on how to discourage passengers who attempted to get information about places offering child sex prostitution.

“We taught them on how to politely reject such passengers so that they don’t get offended,” Ms Muang said.

The training is also expected to encourage the drivers to lead efforts in fight against child sex tourism in their own hometowns.

“We want to help break the chain of child sex tourism in the country,” Ms Muang said.

Mr Sofian said the measure was the first of its kind in Indonesia; the governments of Cambodia and Thailand have previously campaigned with local taxi firms to tackle the scourge in their countries.

Ecpat plans to carry out an identical campaign with taxi operators in the five other provinces.

The group’s ultimate goal, Mr Sofian said, was to get the government to pass a law specifically outlawing child prostitution and child pornography, rather than the broad but vague child protection act that prevails today.

“It’s going to take some time for such a law to come about, but in the meantime we want to raise awareness about child sex tourism,” he said.