Dyah Ayu Pitaloka & Tunggadewa Mattangkilang, Malang – Security officers in the East Java town of Malang rounded up 13 commercial sex workers during a raid on Tuesday night, highlighting a growing prostitution problem linked to the closure of a red-light district in neighboring Surabaya.

M. Yusuf, an investigator with the Malang Public Order Agency, or Satpol PP, said on Wednesday that his office had received an increasing number of complaints from the public about prostitutes operating throughout the town.

"It seems like the number of sex workers has increased," he said. "Last year, most of our raids ended with no arrests. But in just two raids so far this year, we've already arrested dozens of prostitutes, some of them twice."

Those netted in Tuesday's raid were found along a number of busy thoroughfares close to the town center. They were jailed overnight and taken before a court on Wednesday morning, where they were ordered to pay token fines of Rp 30,000 ($2.49) each and released into the custody of their families.

Under the Criminal Code, they could have faced a jail sentence of up to three months and fines of up to Rp 10 million.

One of the women caught in the raid, Mistini, 23, said she had worked as a prostitute for three years and had noticed an increase in the number of sex workers in Malang, most of them coming from Surabaya, where the city administration has shut down the Dolly red-light district – for years notorious as the biggest in Southeast Asia.

The Malang-based Paramitra Institute, which focuses on economic empowerment and public health, said it was inevitable that prostitutes would flock to Malang, a popular weekend destination for visitors from Surabaya, following the closure of Dolly and red-light districts in neighboring Kediri and Tulungangung districts.

Sudarsono, the head of a community organization in Dolly working to provide vocational training to the prostitutes, said that officials had always assumed that with Dolly shut last year they would simply return to their homes. But with the city not providing them with jobs, they simply plied their trade elsewhere, he said.

Yoga Ardianto, a spokesman for the Paramitra Institute, said that rather than crack down on the prostitutes in Malang, the authorities should try to educate and empower them so that they could find other jobs.

"We find law enforcement's handling of the prostitution problem careless and inhumane," he said. "By not providing appropriate health counseling [for the prostitutes], they could be exposed to the possibility of HIV transmission and we are worried that this may then be passed on to their children since many of the sex workers are single parents."

In East Kalimantan, meanwhile, authorities in the provincial capital Samarinda say they plan to shut down a red-light district there that is home to some 250 sex workers by July.

The Loa Hui red-light district is the latest being targeted under an increasingly conservative administration, which has already shut down two other prostitution areas in Balikpapan, the province's biggest city, and several smaller ones in Kuta Kartanegara district.

The bid to close the Samarinda red-light district is being led by Islamic clerics, who complain that it is located within half a kilometer of an Islamic boarding school, built after the district was established.