So why is there no effort to deal with cases of trafficking seriously? Even even when the perpetrator’s identity and location is known, the cases are not followed up properly. Until now all we’ve done is talk. If we care about our community, let’s actually do something about it.
Our state system has failed us. Everyone has the right to eat. So why are so many people going hungry? The solution is not just to reach out to migrant workers but to solve the underlying economic and social issues. Because husbands sell their own wives. And in Indramayu, children with no more than a primary school education are sold by their parents, are forced to work because their parents want to buy a fancy house. This shouldn’t be happening in the 21st century. If parents knowingly sell their own children, is this trafficking? Who is the perpetrator? This is where NGOs like Fahmina Institute come in because they can defend victims of such cases.
The government also needs to be more committed to the issue of trafficking. The state should focus its efforts on groups vulnerable to trafficking by creating a legal instrument that is clear, committed to victims rights, so they are protected from coercion and the misuse of authority. This is a matter of law enforcement in terms of recruitment agents, pimps and brothel owners, regional governments and leaders that allow it to happen, and the whole vicious circle that allows trafficking to occur.
KH Hussein Muhammad
(Commisioner of the National Women’s Rights Commision as well as the Head of Fahmina-institute’s policy board)
This failure of law enforcement is one of the factors contributing to the high number of women who become victims of violence and exploitation in the form of trafficking. The state should pay proper attention. We are grateful that the state has passed the Parliamentary Act concerning the Elimination of the Crime of Human Trafficking (21/2007), but now its time it was implemented in a serious, committed fashion.
What we are talking about is rule of law. Religious leaders and organizations need to be take this problem seriously. We can’t just look at it from a moral perspective, or see it as a problem of weakness of faith on the part of victims. Often, they are just trying to survive. And religious leaders are not protecting them or providing any real solution to their problems. We can’t talk about weakness of faith in these situations when people are just trying to stay alive and to make ends meet.
Religious leaders and the faithful among us should do more than just advise people to pray or to attend to their religious duties. We have to actively campaign for protection of victims. We can’t just go back to our pesantren, we also have to reflect upon ourselves, contextualize religious teachings and form closer relationships with the local communities around us.
Faqihuddin Abdul Kodir
(Head of Yayasan Fahmina)
This really is a slap in the face for all concerned: the family, the community and particularly the state. The state has not only failed to protect its citizens from the crime of trafficking, but is actually an accessory to the crime because it just lets these things happen and doesn’t use its power to give any satisfactory form of assistance. Of course, the state isn’t to blame for everything. The community also has a stake in this problem.
