Made Arya Kencana, Denpasar – A court in Bali has been criticized by child protection activists over its relatively lenient 18-month jail sentence for a rapist after he offered to marry his 14-year-old victim.

Komang Aditya Pratama, 19, should have faced a minimum of three years in prison, and up to 15 years, under the charges brought against him from the 2002 Child Protection Law, after he raped the girl multiple times last year.

"This is not right at all and completely inappropriate," Siti Sapura, an activist from the Denpasar Child Protection Institute, or LPA, who has followed the case from the beginning, told the Jakarta Globe on Thursday.

She lambasted the judges at the Denpasar District Court for failing to uphold the spirit of the child protection law, and accused prosecutors of "playing cat and mouse" to keep the victim's family in the dark about the charges and punishment they were seeking against the defendant.

Siti also questioned why the verdict hearing on Wednesday was open to the press, in clear violation of the law, which requires trials involving minors to be heard behind closed doors.

Aditya was arrested by police in Denpasar in February after the family of the 14-year-old girl reported him to the police for raping her on several occasions last year. The girl is currently seven months' pregnant. It is not clear why the girl or her family did not report the rapes at the time they happened, around October last year.

Dewa Puspa Adnyana, the sole judge presiding over the trial, ruled on Wednesday that Aditya should serve 18 months in jail, including time already served. He cited as mitigating circumstances the fact that Aditya had no criminal record and had "promised not to repeat the offense."

The judge also noted Aditya's "goodwill offer" to marry the victim and "be responsible for the baby" – a notion that the girl's family has vehemently rejected.

Before the start of Wednesday's hearing, the judge also raised eyebrows for not clearing the courtroom of all reporters, as required in hearings involving minors. "OK, you can stay, but don't crowd the place," he told the reporters in attendance.

Prosecutors said they were satisfied with the final ruling, arguing that Aditya was 18 at the time he raped the victim and thus should be treated as a minor, for which he would only face half the sentence prescribed in the law. Under Indonesian law, anyone 18 or older is not considered a minor.

The ruling sparked a commotion in the courtroom as the victim's brother walked up to the judge's table to question the leniency of the sentence. Other members of the family later tried to mob Aditya as he was escorted out of the room. Prosecutors have said they will not mount an appeal for a longer sentence.

Judicial what?

Activists from the Indonesian Commission for Child Protection, or KPAI, have vowed to file a judicial review of the 2002 law to impose longer sentences on sexual predators.

Erlinda, the KPAI secretary general, said the move was prompted by the rape in March of a 6-year-old boy at the Jakarta International School by a group of janitors.

She said her organization would push for the maximum sentence to be increased from the current 15 years to life in prison, and for a minimum sentence of 15 years to be instated.

She did not say how a judicial review would help in this regard. Such a review, heard by the Constitutional Court, can only determine if a particular article in a law is unconstitutional or not, and cannot change the substance of the law, short of striking down one or more articles.

To get the prescribed sentences changed, amendments to the 2002 law would need to be submitted to the House of Representatives for legislation.

The KPAI has also come in for criticism for revealing personally identifiable details about the victim and explicit details about the rape.

It has also crusaded for a thorough check into all of the JIS teachers, despite the fact that the suspects named and arrested in the case are all Indonesian janitors from the outsourcing company ISS.

All across the country The Bali and Jakarta cases are among dozens of cases of sexual abuse of minors being reported from across the country.

In Pekanbaru, in Sumatra's Riau province, police received five reports of child sex abuse last month, starting with an allegation by the family of an 11-year-old girl that she had been molested by her 52-year-old language teacher.

Police said they were studying video recordings from CCTV cameras at the girl's house, where the teacher allegedly molested her on several occasions when he came for lessons. He was reportedly unaware that there were several CCTV cameras throughout the house.

In another case, a 16-year-old boy and a 19-year-old boy are being investigated for the alleged gang rape of a 10-year-old girl in their neighborhood.

In Sukabumi, West Java, police said they had received six reports of sexual violence over the past month, most of them involving victims who were minors. In most of the cases, the perpetrators lived in the same neighborhoods.

In Padang Sidempuan, North Sumatra, police have arrested a 42-year-old man for allegedly sexually assaulting a 14-year-old who is hearing-impaired in the toilet of a bus terminal. The man denies he was trying to rape her, claiming she slipped in the toilet and he was trying to help her up.

In Malang, East Java, an Islamic middle school has fired one of its teachers after he was alleged to be having an affair with one of his students.

School officials acknowledged that the teacher, Syamsul Hadi, 42, was known to have had an affair with a student four years earlier, for which he had been demoted as the school principal at the time.

They said they were compelled to fire him after it came to light that he was currently having an affair with another student, aged 14. Ali Affandi, the current principal, said the school fired Syamsul on Tuesday, a day after the police named him a suspect for statutory rape.

"The school apologizes to the victim's parents, the public and stakeholders. The school respects the legal process," Ali said. He declined to say why the school had not reported Syamsul to the police for the affair four years earlier.

[Additional reporting by Dyah Ayu Pitaloka in Malang.]

Source: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/child-sex-abuse-cases-law-trial/