Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta – A string of murders, mutilations and corpse rapes of Indonesian street children has prompted outrage and led political leaders to question the lack of a safety net for the country's estimated 100 million people living below the poverty line.
A confessed sex-killer, 49-year-old Bayquni, reportedly admitted at the weekend to having murdered and defiled four more children, bringing the number of victims discovered since his arrest three weeks ago to 14. Authorities fear the toll could rise further. At least one friend of a victim is still missing.
Bayquni has told investigators his rampage began in 1998 with the strangling death and sodomy of a street child.
Many of his victims were children who Bayquni had taken under his wing. Boys at a Jakarta youth halfway house told a newspaper reporter in recent days they thought he was a "good man" but that he had a habit of turning violent when provoked.
The boys said they regularly handed over part of their busking earnings to Bayquni, popularly known as "Babe" (pronounced bah-be) a word that means father in local Betawi dialect.
Police are collecting statements from at least 15 children who were associated with Bayquni, some of whom told them he forced himself on them sexually and insisted on bathing them.
However, Bayquni's main fetish seems to have been to have sex with boys he had killed: the murder that prompted his arrest was that of a nine-year-old street child who died and was mutilated last month after refusing to be sodomised by the man.
Indonesia's director of rehabilitation services in the social affairs ministry, Makmur Sunusi, told a parliamentary committee last week there were an estimated 233,000 street children nationwide, from a total population of around 230 million.
This figure was up from just 36,000 in 1997 – the period at the end of the reign of the late dictator Suharto, under whom Indonesia's extremely wealthy prospered but also a period when, in the view of many, the poor were taken care of. Mr Sunusi admitted that current government funding designed to address children's problems was able to reach only about 4 per cent of those at risk.
"The increase in the country's child population, which is in excess of the budget's ability to provide for them, is the reason for the number of children with problems increasing," Mr Sunusi said.
The capital, Jakarta, while home to some of Indonesia's wealthiest people, also counts some of the country's poorest in a constantly shifting population of anything up to 20 million.
Poverty is generational, and many of the city's thousands of street children are sent out by their parents to busk, beg or sort garbage, returning to cardboard and corrugated iron slum homes at night.
Many more have nowhere safe to live at all, surviving on scraps in the shadows of the city's hotels and boom-economy office blocks.
Community-run halfway houses attempt to provide some kind of social services, including basic education, but officials recognise they face a losing battle.
Authorities, including Jakarta governor Fauzi Bowo, admit a recent plan to give street children medical checks to determine whether they had been sodomised was probably missing the point. "We need better programs to educate them and empower them," Mr Bowo said.
Or, as Atma Jaya University psychology lecturer Irwanto noted yesterday: "The absence of a basic, complete and systemic child protection system creates an opportunity for ad-hoc, reactive and project-oriented approaches... which validate violations of (street children's) rights for the public good."