14 DAY TRIAL // 129 children have been reported missing this year alone in Indonesia, and a quarter of those are said to have been lured by human-trafficking groups via Facebook.
According to Australia Network News, the victims are scouted after posting their photos on Facebook, and then lured into meeting members of trafficking rings.
“I am very sure that this is done by groups who use the internet or social networking sites like Facebook as a tool to trick or deceive (the victim),” the director of the National Commission for Child Protection, Arist Merdeka Sirait, states.
Indonesia currently has over 50 million users registered on Facebook, and keeping track of suspicious entries has become a nightmare, especially since girls come willingly to meet their kidnappers.
"They use Facebook as a gateway for human trafficking syndicates," Mr. Sirait says.
One fourteen-year-old girl from Depok suffered a terrible ordeal as she met a man on Facebook and agreed to meet him.
"I have many friends on Facebook and we often exchanged phone numbers, but they're just friends," she said.
The girl was locked in a house with other five girls where she endured a week of relentless torture – rape, beating and threats to her life.
The man she had met and his accomplices had planned to fly her out to the island of Batam, but ran into financial troubles and had to dispose of her, dropping her off in a bus station.
“I was given a drug that made me semi-conscious. [...] Every day I was guarded by them so I could not escape,” she says, describing what she went through.
Indonesian authorities are working with Interpol to detect illegal activity on site, but, sometimes not even the girls' parents know what is going on.
"It is an issue that's very hard to fight because very often children are in their own homes, often together with their parents, going on the Internet and trying to make contacts with people out there," Mr. Sirait added.