Facebook's role in trafficking on Indonesian girls

DEPOK, Indonesia -- When a 14-year-old girl received a Facebook friend request from an older man she didn't know, she accepted it out of curiosity. It's a click she will forever regret, leading to a brutal story that has repeated itself as sexual predators find new ways to exploit Indonesia's growing obsession with social media.

The junior high student was quickly smitten by the man's smooth online flattery. They exchanged phone numbers, and his attention increased with rapid-fire texts. He persuaded her to meet in a mall, and she found him just as charming in person.

They agreed to meet again. After telling her mom she was going to visit a sick girlfriend on her way to church choir practice, she climbed into the man's minivan near her home in Depok, on the outskirts of Jakarta.

Yogi, 24, drove her an hour to the town of Bogor, West Java, she told The Associated Press in an interview. There, he locked her in a small room in a house with at least five other girls aged 14 to 17. She was drugged and raped repeatedly.

After a week of torture, her captor told her she was being sold and shipped to the faraway island of Batam, known for its seedy brothels and child sex tourism that caters to men coming by boat from nearby Singapore. She sobbed hysterically and begged to go home. She was beaten and told to shut up or die.

So far this year, 27 of the 129 children reported missing to Indonesia's National Commission for Child Protection are believed to have been abducted after meeting their captors on social media, said the group's chairman, Arist Merdeka Sirait. One of those has been found dead.

In the month since the Depok girl was found near a bus terminal Sept. 30, there have been at least seven reports of young girls in Indonesia being abducted by people they met on Facebook. Although no solid data exist, police and aid groups that work on trafficking issues say it seems to be a particularly big problem in the Southeast Asian archipelago.

"Maybe Indonesia is kind of a unique country so far. Once the reports start coming in, you will know that maybe it's not one of the countries, maybe it's one of a hundred countries," said Anjan Bose of ECPAT International, a nonprofit global network that helps children in 70 countries.

"We are racing against time, and the technology frenzy over Facebook is a trend among teenagers here," Sirait said. "Police should move faster, or many more girls will become victims."