Nurfika Osman – Labor activists said on Wednesday they were wary that overseas internships offered to vocational high school students could be used as a cover for female trafficking, and urged the government to increase educational and employment opportunities for women at home.
"Many vocational female students are sent to neighboring countries such as Malaysia and Hong Kong for internship programs," said Arum Ratnawati, the national chief technical adviser for the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor at the International Labor Organization.
"These internship programs could become new methods to lure young women into commercial sexual exploitation," she said.
Ratnawati acknowledged that her office had little concrete data on whether or not young women were being duped into prostitution through overseas internship programs.
She suggested, however, that participants in these types of programs, who are mostly females between the ages of 15 and 17, were not well informed about the programs and came from poor families, making them susceptible to sexual exploitation.
"Girls need to be empowered through education so that they are not easily lured by traffickers," she said, adding that the ILO was helping Indonesia strengthen the outreach of domestic workers' organizations and creating linkages with organizations of migrant workers in destination countries, and this included a focus on child trafficking.
The ILO estimates that between 40,000 and 70,000 children in the country are victims of sexual exploitation, and that 100,000 children are trafficked every year. These figures include domestic trafficking.
"There are many cases of domestic human trafficking and the fact that Indonesia is a vast archipelago makes it easy to move victims from one part of the country to another," Ratnawati said.
Echoing Ratnawati's concerns, Sri Wiyanti Eddyono, a member of the National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan), said human trafficking was not just a problem in international border areas such as Batam and West Kalimantan, but also within the country.
Eddyono blamed the government's failure to improve the people's welfare, particularly that of women, as the primary reason for rampant human trafficking in the country.
"Poverty has forced society into sacrificing its women, turning them into a survival commodity," she said.
"Girls as young as 13 years old are being sold into prostitution by their parents due to poverty," she said, adding that ethnicity is also a factor in trafficking.
"For example, ethnic Chinese teenage girls in West Kalimantan are recruited as mail-order brides for men in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
"I am afraid that if we allow this practice to continue, it will become part of our culture and all people, including women, will see it as the norm," she said.
According to the ILO, around 30 percent of female prostitutes in the country are below 18 years of age. Some are as young as 10 years old.