The arrest of four people over the weekend who have been accused by police of systematically drugging and beating children so they can beg for money has finally put the media spotlight on the exploitation faced by child beggars in Jakarta and the rest of Indonesia.
In response, the Ministry of Women Empowerment and Child Protection has promised to create 3,000 centers across the country where people can report child exploitation and the police have said they will more closely investigate cases of child begging in the future.
But the most concrete plan to help child beggars that we’ve heard from a government official is that of Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama. He has promised that, before the end of 2016, he would build a boarding school capable of housing and educating 2,000 child beggars.
“This year we will build [a boarding school] for 2,000 children with the Pondok Karya Pembangunan Foundation. It will be a secular school, but organized like a pesantren. We want these children to still go to school,” Ahok said today as quoted by Liputan6.
Ahok went on to say that he did not believe that there was anybody in Jakarta who was truly begging just to buy food. Instead, he said most beggars were older people who could not work and should be taken care of by the capital’s social welfare programs, or they were young people being exploited by adults to make money.
The governor also mentioned that he was considering shutting down Jakarta’s 3-in-1 traffic scheme, which only allows cars with more than two people to use certain major roads during rush hour. There have been reports that some “3-in-1 joki”, the people who ride in cars so that their drivers can use the 3-in-1 roads, have been renting babies for Rp 200,000 per day so they can make more money. Reports also suggest that these babies are sometimes drugged so they are easier to manage.
Reader Interactions