Predators use Facebook to abduct Indonesian girls

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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 convinced her to meet him 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 the capital, Jakarta.

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

After one 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 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 Facebook. One of those befriended on the social media site has been found dead.

In the month since the Depok girl was found near a bus terminal on 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 exists, police and aid groups that work on trafficking issues say it seems to be a particularly big problem in the Southeast Asian archipelago.

Websites that track social media say Indonesia has nearly 50 million people signed up for Facebook, making it one of the world's top users after the US. Jakarta was recently named the most active Twitter city by Paris-based social media monitoring company Semiocast. Networking groups such as BlackBerry and Yahoo Messenger are wildly popular on mobile phones.

Many young Indonesians, and their parents, are unaware of the dangers of allowing strangers to see their personal information online. Teenagers frequently post photos and personal details such as their home address, phone number, school and hangouts without using any privacy settings - allowing anyone trolling the net to find them and learn everything about them.

The 27 Facebook-related abductions reported to the commission this year in Indonesia have already exceeded the 18 cases it received in 2011.

The National Task Force Against Human Trafficking said 435 children were trafficked last year, mostly for sexual exploitation.

Many who fight child sex crimes in Indonesia believe the real numbers are much higher. Missing children are often not reported to authorities. Stigma and shame surround sexual abuse in the world's largest Muslim-majority country, and there is a widespread belief that police will do nothing to help.

One international agency working with children estimates that each year, 40,000 to 70,000children are involved in trafficking, pornography or prostitution in Indonesia, a nation of 240million where many families remain impoverished.

Facebook says its investigators regularly review content on the site and work with authorities, including Interpol, to combat illegal activity.

"We take human trafficking very seriously and, while this behavior is not common on Facebook, a number of measures are in place to counter this activity," spokesman Andrew Noyes said in an e-mail.

About the broadcaster:

Emily Cheng is an editor at China Daily. She was born in Sydney, Australia and graduated from the University of Sydney with a degree in Media, English Literature and Politics. She has worked in the media industry since starting university and this is the third time she has settled abroad - she interned with a magazine in Hong Kong 2007 and studied at the University of Leeds in 2009.