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MEDIA-INDONESIA: When ‘Adding a Friend’ on Facebook Can Be Risky

Kafil Yamin

JAKARTA, Feb 17 2010 (IPS) - It is every parent’s worst nightmare in the Internet age – and for Syafei Asyhari, this happened when he found that his 16-year-old daughter, Latifa, fell into the clutches of traffickers she met online as friends.

“I called her a few days ago at her mobile phone. I got connected, but no one answered and soon, the phone was switched off,” Asyhari said in tears as he talked to local television station ‘Trans 7’ on Feb. 13, two weeks after she went missing from her home in Jombang, East Java in Indonesia.

It was later known that Latifa went to the capital Jakarta with a new friend she had met through the social networking site Facebook. Through a brief message relayed to Latifa’s classmate, Asyhari learned that Latifa was under heavy guard by her ‘employer’.

On Feb. 11, Sylvia Russarina, a 23-year-old student of Diponegoro University in the Central Java city of Semarang, was also reported missing. Her last message to her mother was: “Mom, don’t try to find me. I am just fine.”

“A friend of hers told me that my sister recently became close to a new friend she knew through Facebook,” said Maria, Sylvia’s sister.

The parents have reported the incidents about the two missing girls to the police. Arbaridi Jumhur, head of the Surabaya police crime section, said there was a possibility that Latifa and Sylvia fell victim to traffickers preying on unsuspecting youth on Facebook.

Cases like these are causing concerns about social networking among parents, child rights campaigners and religious groups in this mainly Muslim country, drawing reactions that range from calls for a need for parents to be involved in their children’s online lives to more emotional views.

Others argue that is destroying norms and social values in Indonesia. On May 20 last year, ‘ulama’ and Muslim clerics, along with 50 leaders of Muslim boarding schools in East Java, a traditional Muslim base in Indonesia, met in Kediri town and reached a joint Islamic religious ruling, or ‘fatwa’, that Facebook was ‘haram’ (forbidden).

But no one seems to be following this ‘fatwa’, not least because new media and technology have become such a regular – and mostly safe – part of many people’s lives today.

Still, child rights advocates and officials say that the ease of access to the Internet and connecting to other people without the supervision and guidance of older people do add a dimension of risk to issues of sexual abuse and human trafficking these days.

“Facebook makes these crimes easier to execute,” said Aris Merdeka Sirait, secretary general of the National Commission for Child Protection. News reports in January said that two people had been arrested for engaging in the sex trade through Facebook.

Afif Margarini, one of those arrested, is accused of hunting for and supplying girls to his accomplice Endy Muchilisin, who put the girls’ photos up on his Facebook account. He would then offer viewers a date with the girls. After making a deal and getting a down payment, Muchilisin would then arrange a date in a certain place with his client.

Due to the pair’s regular transactions, the Surabaya Police were able to locate the meeting places for the girls and the clients, and made arrests.

Likewise, citing a case in the Jakarta police records, Sirait said that early this month a girl was deceived through Facebook to meet a man and have sex with him. Shortly after that, she was forced to give sexual favours to another man. If she refused, the man threatened to spread explicit photos of her on the Internet. The girl had no choice but to obey, Sirait added.

But amid the concern expressed over these incidents, Sirait says that banning the use of Facebook and social networking on the Internet would not work. “What can be done is to build good education among the families, in schools and social groups to balance the development of technology,” he said.

The debate about how to handle the potentials and risks of new media and technology has also been a hot topic on radio talk shows and in letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines.

As is common in other countries, Indonesian mothers often complain about not having access to their children’s online worlds and not knowing how to manage these. Many of them have complained about their sons and daughters rejecting their ‘add as friend’ requests on Facebook, preventing them from following their activities online.

Sirait said the sex trade and trafficking has become much more complex these days, with new elements and ways made available by factors such as consumerism and new technology on top of what experts used to attribute mainly to the poverty factor.

Some child rights campaigners have said that some girls have cited wanting to live fancier lifestyles as reasons for being part of the online sex trade. Studies done by the International Organization for Migration showed that Indonesia had 1,231 cases of human trafficking in 2007, the highest number of such cases in the world during that year.

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, 40,000 Indonesian children became victims of sexual exploitation and abuse in 2009.

Coordinating Minister for Social Welfare Agung Laksono said that human trafficking, involving mostly female teens, is on the rise. Traffickers usually send victims overseas supposedly for legitimate jobs, but the girls end up as sex workers.

Referring to the latest police reports, Laksono said there were 607 cases of human trafficking in 2009 in Indonesia, involving 857 suspects and 2,055 victims, 485 of whom were under 15 years old.

“Women and children are the main victims,” Laksono said.