Agnes Winarti, Jakarta – Due to a lack of accurate data, authorities in North Jakarta are finding it difficult to deal with the problem of human trafficking, an official said at a public discussion Thursday.
"In order to stop trafficking, we need valid data and not just estimations," Tukijan Damanik, an official at the North Jakarta social welfare and mental education agency, said.
"At the moment we can only rely on public order raids to estimate the number of prostitutes in the area."
The discussion was jointly organized by the Indonesia Against Child Trafficking (ACTs) organization, the Women's Journal Foundation and the Women and Children Foundation.
Several discussion participants said they hoped local and international non-governmental organizations would work with the government to obtain more reliable data on the victims of human trafficking.
Yeremias Wutan from the International Organization for Migration said Jakarta, Batam, Tanjung Balai Karit and Tanjung Pinang were common destinations and transit points for trafficked women.
"Accurate data on the victims of human trafficking is hard to find. Most NGOs still use estimated figures," he said.
Between 150,000 and 200,000 women work as prostitutes in Jakarta, mostly in the northern and western parts of the city, he added.
Jeremias said that between 2005 and 2007 it was estimated 30 percent of commercial sex workers in Jakarta were children. "All children working as prostitutes are the victims of human trafficking," he said.
Tukijan said a large number of sex workers, including children, work in North Jakarta, "because it is located near Tanjung Priok port, where there is a lot of business from people like sailors and container truck drivers".
He said it would be better to have an official red-light district in the city, as after the Kramat Tunggak area was closed down in 1999, an increasing number of prostitutes had been appearing in North Jakarta.
Vera Ersi from Plan International Indonesia said an official red-light district in the city would not be suitable, as children would still work in the area and would be told to lie about their real ages.
"Many of them don't even know how old they are as they don't have birth certificates," she added.
She said this year her organization identified more than 250 girls living in Rawamalang as victims of child trafficking who had been forced to work as prostitutes.
In 2006, the Women and Children Foundation rescued some 210 victims of human trafficking who had been forced to work as prostitutes in North Jakarta's Cilincing subdistrict.
Over the past two years, ACTs has worked with several other non-governmental organizations to assist more than 100 girls under the age of 18 years who had been forced to work as prostitutes in areas such as Pontianak in West Kalimantan, Medan in North Sumatra, Batam in Riau, Semarang in Central Java, Surabaya and Indramayu in West Java.