Peter Gelling, Jakarta – Wani, an Indonesian domestic servant, tells Human Rights Watch in a new report that when she was 13 years old, her female employer would pin her up against a wall and slap her repeatedly, calling her "stupid," or "the devil."

Another girl, 15, recounted stories of her employer's husband walking around the house naked when they were alone together, asking if she would like to see his penis. A 17-year-old said she had been raped.

Such stories, according to the Human Rights Watch report, released Wednesday in Jakarta, are not uncommon among the hundreds of thousands of child domestic workers in Indonesia.

The International Labor Organization found that about 690,000 children under 18 were employed as domestic help, where they were often forced to work up to 18 hours a day for, in some cases, as little as six cents an hour, with no day off and no vacation time. In the worst cases, the children were physically, psychologically or sexually abused.

The report chastises the Indonesian government, which has recently begun lobbying for better working conditions for Indonesian domestic workers in other countries, for not taking care of the ones at home. The legal employment age in Indonesia is 15, but many domestic workers start as early as 11.

In a letter to Human Rights Watch, the governor of Jakarta, Fauzi Bowo, admitted that although labor organizations did inspections at commercial places of work and factories, there were no inspections made at homes.

The 73-page report, titled "Workers in the Shadows: Abuse and Exploitation of Child Domestic Workers in Indonesia," called on the Indonesian government to "grant fundamental labor rights to domestic workers," and to enforce the existing minimum age requirement of 15 for all workers.

"Indonesia's child domestic workers work longer and harder than many adults, but the government excludes them from laws that protect the rest of the work force," Bede Sheppard, a researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of the report, said in a statement.

Employers often purposely hire underage workers because they are not subject to the same laws as adults, can work longer hours for less pay and have fewer social connections to distract them. Adult workers in the Indonesian formal sector are entitled to a minimum wage, overtime pay, an eight-hour workday, a 40-hour work week, a weekly day of rest and vacation. Domestic workers are not, the report said.

The Indonesian government has passed several promising laws in the last five years to protect child workers, but they are only sporadically enforced.