Son is the pimp from central casting. Dressed in black skivvy and pants, he's boastful and loquacious with a chunky gold ring and "Barbie Girl" for a phone ringtone. He claims he no longer works in Indonesia's thriving sex industry, but then extols his judgment as a purveyor of girls. Until last year, Son worked as a "channeller", supplying village girls from the Indramayu region of West Java to the brothels of Jakarta and Sumatra. Credit: Eka Nickmatulhuda. Can you take her? Son would then tell the parents if their desires were realistic: "A pimp can see if the girl is pretty enough, how many guests she will get per night.
It's as simple as that. The parents would get a loan and their daughter would pay it back with her labour, usually over 2 to 3 years. A disproportionate number of Indonesia's prostitutes come from this one small cluster of villages in West Java. Not every girl here becomes a sex worker, but again and again in these villages we hear the same story: when an Indramayu family has a baby girl, they celebrate. They know that, if it becomes necessary in the future, she'll be able to support her whole family.
Indramayu has become the region that sells its daughters. Nur'Asiah dresses for work. Nur'asiah is a slight year-old. On the wall of her grandparents' house in the Indramayu village of Bongas hangs a picture of her as a little girl dressed up as a princess. But this young woman is herself the mother of a six-year-old son, born when she was She is also a veteran of an month career as a prostitute and "sexy dancer" in the King Cross bar in the north Jakarta suburb of Kelapa Gading. But the real money was for sex.
At first Nur'Asiah only wanted to dance, but the bar owner pushed the point. I knew then that by saying yes, I'd have to do sexy dancing 'plus plus'. Seven-year-old Disty at the ceremony to mark the circumcision she had at birth. Money also went to support Nur'Asiah's son. I didn't like it, but I needed the money. Her grandfather, Dasmin, a beneficiary of the house renovation, is comfortable with what has happened. For perhaps 30 years Indramayu has been exporting its daughters, from the age of 15 or 16 up, to brothels across Indonesia.
Though this course of action is so common that there is very little stigma, officially it's frowned upon. In , Indonesia banned the traffic in girls under But the industry adapted, and these days many young Indramayu girls are recruited by their friends, says Sukim, a former pimp who now works at Yayasan Kusuma Bongas, a non-government organisation devoted to fighting the recruitment of sex workers.
