SUTHINI was 14 when she was forced to hide in the boot of a car and transported, without documents, across Indonesia’s land border into Malaysia to be sold into forced prostitution
Suthini (not her real name) protested vehemently on arrival at the boarding house where her new owner was to keep her captive but was punished with kicks and beatings.
Eventually, after what the Indonesian girl was told was a medical test to verify her virginity, she was raped by two men in a hotel room in Kuching, East Malaysia.
“They took some kind of stimulant [for themselves] and they gave me something to drink so that I didn’t know what was going on,” the shy village teenager says in an almost-whisper, sitting in an office at the Jakarta women’s refuge where she has started rebuilding her life in recent weeks.
She is learning hairdressing at the state-run facility in the hope of breaking out of the cycle of violence and sexual abuse endured by so many Indonesian women, and tentatively remaking contact with family members, most of whom had no idea where she was for the duration of her 18-month ordeal.
Suthini’s recall of the men who abused her is limited or at least she has blocked it out: her best description of them was that one of them was “Chinese”. For two days after the rape, she says, she cowered in the dingy hotel room where the assault took place. “I was destroyed,”she whispers. “And they got away.”
Eventually she escaped from her new owner, although not before prolonged and repeated beatings, she says, and a subsequent period of several months working as a maid for no pay and little food.
Suthini’s story is almost unremarkable for its frequency in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia. Her version of it, however, carries the nuance and scars of her individual experience, beginning with the uncle in the West Java village of her youth who she says tried to rape her, and his wife, who subsequently blamed Suthini for tempting the man.
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