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When a 14-year-old girl received a Facebook friend request from an older
man she didn't know, she accepted it out of curiosity. It's a click she will
forever regret, leading to a brutal story that has repeated itself as sexual
predators find new ways to exploit Indonesia's growing obsession with social
media.
The junior high student was quickly smitten by the man's smooth online
flattery. They exchanged phone numbers, and his attention increased with
rapid-fire texts. He convinced her to meet in a mall, and she found him just as
charming in person. They agreed to meet again. After telling her mom she was
going to visit a sick girlfriend on her way to church choir practice, she
climbed into the man's minivan near her home in Depok, on the outskirts of
Jakarta.
The man, a 24-year-old who called himself Yogi, drove her an hour to the
town of Bogor, West Java, she told The Associated Press in an interview.
There, he locked her in a small room inside a house with at least five
other girls aged 14 to 17. She was drugged and raped repeatedly - losing her
virginity in the first violent session.
After one week of torture, her captor told her she was being sold and
shipped to the faraway island of Batam, known for its seedy brothels and child
sex tourism that caters to men coming by boat from nearby Singapore.She sobbed
hysterically and begged to go home. She was beaten and told to shut up or die.
----
So far this year, 27 of the 129 children reported missing to Indonesia's
National Commission for Child Protection are believed to have been abducted
after meeting their captors on Facebook, said the group's chairman, Arist
Merdeka Sirait. One of those befriended on the social media site has been found
dead.
In the month since the Depok girl was found near a bus terminal on
September 30, there have been at least seven reports of young girls in
Indonesia being abducted by people they met on Facebook. Although no solid data
exists, police and aid groups that work on trafficking issues say it seems to
be a particularly big problem in the Southeast Asian archipelago. "Maybe
Indonesia is kind of a unique country so far. Once the reports start coming in,
you will know that maybe it's not one of the countries, maybe it's one of a
hundred countries," said Anjan Bose, a program officer who works on child
online protection issues at ECPAT International, a non-profit global network
that helps children in 70 countries. "The Internet is such a global
medium. It doesn't differentiate between poor and rich. It doesn't
differentiate between the economy of the country or the culture."
Websites that track social media say Indonesia has nearly 50 million
people signed up for Facebook, making it one of the world's top users after the
US. The capital, Jakarta, was recently named the most active Twitter city by
Paris-based social media monitoring company Semiocast. In addition, networking
groups such as BlackBerry and Yahoo Messenger are wildly popular on mobile
phones. Many young Indonesians, and their parents, are unaware of the dangers
of allowing strangers to see their personal information online. Teenagers
frequently post photos and personal details such as their home address, phone
number, school and hangouts without using any privacy settings - allowing
anyone trolling the net to find them and learn everything about them. "We
are racing against time, and the technology frenzy over Facebook is a trend
among teenagers here," Sirait said. "Police should move faster, or
many more girls will become victims."
The 27 Facebook-related abductions reported to the commission this year
in Indonesia have already exceed 18 similar cases it received in all of 2011.
Overall, the National Task Force Against Human Trafficking said 435 children
were trafficked last year, mostly for sexual exploitation. Many who fight child
sex crimes in Indonesia believe the real numbers are much higher. Missing
children are often not reported to authorities. Stigma and shame surround
sexual abuse in the world's largest Muslim-majority country, and there's a
widespread belief that police will do nothing to help.
An ECPAT International report estimates that each year, 40,000 to 70,000
children are involved in trafficking, pornography or prostitution in Indonesia,
a nation of 240 million where many families remain impoverished. The US State
Department has also warned that more Indonesian girls are being recruited using
social media networks. In a report last year, it said traffickers have
"resorted to outright kidnapping of girls and young women for sex
trafficking within the country and abroad".
Online child sexual abuse and exploitation are common in much of Asia.
In the Philippines, kids are being forced to strip or perform sex acts on live
webcams - often by their parents, who are using them as a source of income.
Western men typically pay to use the sites. "In the Philippines, this is
the tip of the iceberg. It's not only Facebook and social media, but it's also
through text messages ... especially young, vulnerable people are being
targeted," said Leonarda Kling, regional representative for Terre des
Hommes Netherlands, a non-profit working on trafficking issues. "It's all
about promises. Better jobs or maybe even a nice telephone or whatever. Young
people now, you see all the glamour and glitter around you and they want to
have the latest BlackBerry, the latest fashion, and it's also a way to get
these things."
Facebook says its investigators regularly review content on the site and
work with authorities, including Interpol, to combat illegal activity. It also
has employees around the world tasked with cracking down on people who attempt
to use the site for human trafficking. "We take human trafficking very seriously
and, while this behaviour is not common on Facebook, a number of measures are
in place to counter this activity," spokesman Andrew Noyes said in an
email.
He declined to give any details on Facebook's involvement in trafficking
cases reported in Indonesia or elsewhere.
----
The Depok girl, wearing a mask to hide her face as she was interviewed,
said she is still shocked that the man she knew for nearly a month turned on
her. "He wanted to buy new clothes for me, and help with school payments.
He was different ... that's all," she said. "I have a lot of contacts
through Facebook, and I've also exchanged phone numbers. But everything has
always gone fine. We were just friends." She said that after being
kidnapped, she was given sleeping pills and was "mostly unconscious"
for her ordeal. She said she could not escape because a man and another girl
stood guard over her.
The girl said the man did not have the money for a plane ticket to
Batam, and also became aware that her parents and others were relentlessly
searching for her. He ended up dumping her at a bus station, where she found
help. "I am angry and cannot accept what he did to me. ... I was raped and
beaten!" said the lanky girl with shoulder-length black hair. The AP
generally does not publish the names of sexual abuse victims. The girl's case
made headlines this month when she was expelled after she tried to return to
school.
School officials claimed she had tarnished the school's image. She has
since been reinstated, but she no longer wishes to attend due to the stigma she
faces. Education Minister Mohammad Nuh also came under fire after making
remarks that not all girls who report such crimes are victims: "They do it
for fun, and then the girl alleges that it's rape," he said. His response
to the criticism - that it's difficult to prove whether sexual assault
allegations are "real rapes," drew more condemnation. The publicity
surrounding the story encouraged the parents of five other missing girls to
come forward this month, saying their daughters also were victimised by people
they met on Facebook.
Two more girls were freed from the captors in October and are now
seeking counseling. A man who posed as a photographer on Facebook was recently
arrested and accused of kidnapping and raping three teenage girls. Authorities
say he lured them into meeting him with him by promising to make them models,
and then locked them in a house. Police found dozens of photos of naked girls
on his camera and laptop. Another case involved a 15-year-old girl from Bogor.
She was recently rescued by police after being kidnapped by her Facebook
"friend" and held at a restaurant, waiting for someone to move her to
another town where she would be forced into prostitution.
In some incidents, the victims themselves ended up recruiting other
young girls after being promised money or luxuries such as mobile phones or new
clothes. Police are trying to get a step ahead of the criminals. Detective Lt.
Ruth Yeni Qomariah from the Children and Women's Protection unit in Surabaya
said she posed as a teenager online and busted three men who used Facebook to
kidnap and rape underage girls. She's searching for a fourth suspect. "It
has been getting worse as trafficking rings become more sophisticated and
underage children are more easily targeted," she said. The man who
abducted the Depok girl has not been found, and it's unclear what happened to
the five other girls held at the house where she was raped. "I saw they
were offered by my kidnapper to many guys," she said. "I don't know
what happened. I don't want to remember it."
NZ Herald
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