Introduction
In the contemporary world, child labor and human trafficking are some of the problems encountered by many countries. On the one hand, human trafficking is the recruitment, transfer, transportation, or receipt of people through the use of force, violence, abduction, threat, deception, forgery, abuse of power. It also includes fraud for exploitation, which comprises slavery, any kind of sexual exploitation, or forced labor (Riwayanto,2017), Pg. 378-387. Trafficking in persons is seen as a crime against humanity.
On the other hand, Child labor is the exploitative work that deprives young children of their potential and dignity and hurts their physical and mental growth. In other terms, the term 'child labor' encompasses all the economic activities that threaten the well-being of young children. Indonesia is one of the countries where human trafficking and child labor are prevalent and have severe effects on the affected people, their families, and to the entire country. In this paper, these modern problems of human trafficking and child labor will be discussed in detail. The paper will also discuss some of the significant adverse effects faced by the country due to human trafficking and child labor, and propose some measures or strategies that can be taken to help in addressing these problems.
In Indonesia, human trafficking and child labor takes many forms. The first recognized sector is migrant work. There has been a detrimental rise in the migration of women without the knowledge of the relevant ministry. They seemingly migrate for work in different sectors such as domestic work, restaurant help, the entertainment industry, and factory and plantation work. The recruitment is executed through illegal and even legal channels, but migrants themselves are unaware of such channels. The recruiters use the same transportation and recruitment methods in the entire country. There is usually falsification of documents, especially in young aged women, when migrating through the registered brokers. Migrants often endure large debts to the agents forcing the deduction of their salaries for debt settlement. Trafficked victims are always exploited in many ways, such as sexual harassment and abuse. The government is indirectly allowing trafficking problems to escalate.
The other form is domestic work, where most of the women work domestically as helpers and caregivers. The trafficked victims are usually confined under privacy while at the same time, their movements are monitored. The kind of employment often occurs in an informal setting where the governmental agencies and bodies are far from reach. The workers have to endure working under harsh environments for long hours, non-payment of wages or reduced, psychological or physical abuse, sexual assault, uncomfortable sleep while at the same time being denied food. The third one is the sex work form, a situation where victims are internationally recruited into the sex industry. A higher number of women have paid some amount to the recruiters without understanding the nature of the work until it becomes a living reality.
Traffickers are known to falsify their documents so that the victims fear to report the cases to the relevant authorities. Some of the women get recruited into the sex industry knowingly. In rare cases, parents themselves can facilitate children trafficking specifically through informal or formal parental authority. There are sub-cultures where families of young girls arrange for moving them into the cities to work as dancers where they may be involved partly as sex workers. Mail order brides are the fourth form in which the parents arrange for the traditional marriages for their children. They fail to consider their child's preferences. The marriages for underaged is a total violation of human rights, thus exposing them to suffering from psychological trauma. The practice is known to be rampant among the Chinese Indonesian community, where men from Taiwan are considered as prospective husbands. Most of the young women who have been married in such a way have faced humiliations of working like slaves for long hours with no salary and treated as not part of the family. Such hostile treatments could germinate into forced sale into sex industries by or even to brothels. Marriages could be facilitated through some brokers in different places in Indonesia.
Both women and young girls have been trafficked because of the underlying factors that make them vulnerable. Poverty is one of the main catapulting factors of trafficking. Poor people are more susceptible to trafficking since they may not be having any other alternative of earning their living through income. The victims are known to hold less social power, thus delineating them from accessing assistance avenues and redress. The desire to receive higher is an impelling force making the poor in the community plunge into trafficking accompanied by a life embedded with misery. The other factor is the low level of education, whereby some people in Indonesia are known to find it challenging to access basic primary education. Besides, other families cannot send their children to school and, in some cases giving priority to boychild. There are vivid differences between the women in the urban and rural set whereby the rural dwellers are less educated, and they are therefore hinged to be less skilled and illiterate. Illiterate women are vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation because of their inability to read and understand the work contracts. They find it difficult to understand the rights they deserve. The third factor is women's role in the family, whereby they have been entitled to an exceptional task of being a wife and mother caring for the home and the entire family. The role also extends further whereby they generate or look for income for family sake. They tend to migrate from home to look for work, thus exposed to a series of exploitation, abuse, and trafficking.
Lastly, status and power are a factor that is determined by aspects such as gender, education, wealth, and class in Indonesia. The older have more status than the young and hence the wealthy and the poor. The voiceless and financially emancipated tend to be driven by the roaring poverty as they seek for a better life. They are therefore trafficked and exploited with ease coercively and subtly. The family members and Village chiefs use their position maliciously by assisting the recruiters to deceive the victims by the uses of bribes in attaining a win-win solution. The tradition of early marriage is also a crucial factor contributing immensely to the rise of trafficking cases and child labor. In many parts of Indonesia, early marriages have a significant precedent history. It is facilitated by the 1974 marriage law, where the minimum age to be considered in a legal marriage is 16 years of age.
The married girls are associated with a low level of education, possessing a higher divorce rate. They are thereby vulnerable to trafficking since, after the divorce, they tend to fend for themselves despite being young. They correspondingly have few economic alternatives since they are economically, emotionally, and financially unprepared. Corruption also serves a crucial role in enabling the trafficking of persons to escalate in Indonesia. It allows all the recruitment agents to engage in the falsification of documents that encapsulate passports, ID cards, and visas. Furthermore, it provides for the transportation and recruitment of minors. The legal systems are seemingly rendered ineffective since the perpetrators may not be punished at all.
Children are routinely taken as investment commodities into an industry operating with total impunity. Traffickers are known to use coercive and psychological manipulation methods to control their victims. Conventional practices that have been reported encompasses sexual, physical as well as psychological violence and failure to access food and water. They are also exposed to routine beatings and abuse by employers. Children often face educational deprivation since they are robbed of the available educational opportunities. There is also an adverse outcome of the educational deprivation among many victims of neglect and abuse. It includes developmental delays, cognitive difficulties, language, poor academic performance, and deficits in memory and verbal skills. They also suffer from physical health problems attached to the inhumane conditions and beatings. They are tacitly denied access to fundamental human rights. The victims are also threatened by risky sexual practices, risk of unwanted pregnancies, unsafe abortions, and infection to sexually transmitted diseases. The victims similarly suffer from a lack of emotional well-being leading to long-lasting psychological challenges. Children suffer from emotional trauma after being removed from their families and communities at large. Some of the children end up suffering from depression, guilt, hopelessness, shame, flashbacks, loss of confidence, and low self-esteem.
Besides, the victims are attached to adverse behavioral outcomes, which include antisocial behaviors, mistrust of adults, and attachment difficulties when they are relating to others. Human trafficking and child labor can affect the country vastly in many ways. Poor access to a proper education by children exposes them to hazardous working, thus affecting their future productivity and hence become a long-term effect in the nation's health. Human trafficking, at the same time, undermines the security and safety of the countries it touches.
The government can align with some special measures and strategies to help curb the problem of human trafficking and child labor. Both the central and local governments should be encouraged in job creation in the country to minimize migration in search of work in the neighboring countries. The immigration authorities at the same time must look be responsive cautious enough in monitoring movements in and out of the country, thus suppressing human trafficking. There should also be supportive cooperation of the police. The regional authorities should be enhanced related to the border areas. Human trafficking is known to occur because border management is botched. There has to be the implementation of the security systems and infrastructural development in the border. It helps culminate the issue of human trafficking to various destinations. The government can also improve the professionalism of law enforcement agency help in handling both women and child trafficking. It must educate to gain knowledge on infringed regulation. There are also policies set to curb the issue of child labor, which include banning child labor, proper education on the dangers of child labor, improving the education system, and financial programs for credit access and monetary transfers.
