Jakarta – Indonesia should overhaul legal protections for child domestic workers to tackle widespread abuse and exploitation throughout the country, a rights group said on Wednesday.

The roughly 688,000 minors cleaning, cooking and looking after children in Indonesian homes are being let down by a system that does not recognise them as workers and excludes them from local labour laws, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report.

Children as young as 11 are working long hours and receiving little or no pay – treatment that is illegal under Indonesian labour law – but they go unprotected as they are classified as "helpers", it said.

"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 workforce," report author Bede Sheppard said in a statement.

"There's a wilful blindness on behalf of some government officials who choose to ignore or deny child domestic workers are exploited and abused," he said.

Furthermore, as many as 40 per cent of child domestic workers face some form of physical, psychological or sexual abuse, Aidi Milihari, the director of the women's rights group Rumpun Gema Perempuan, told AFP.

"We need to address the social context of Indonesia where people think it is all right for children to work in the home. The government says they are treated as part of the family but they are not," Ms Milihari said.