Situations include a tourist taking a local child to their room or on an outing, local people taking children to a tourist’s room, sexually explicit photos of children in a tourist’s room, tourists taking local children to a hotel pool, tourists being very affectionate toward a local child or touching them inappropriately, tourists asking to be taken to a location that is known for child-sex tourism, tourists who are behaving inappropriately in the company of local children and expats living with under-aged children, just paying some money and a new telephone.
Bali and some other major cities have turned into child-sex tourism destinations because there are facilities that support the practices. Bali, Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Surabaya and Yogyakarta as examples of areas where commercial sexual exploitation of children and child-sex tourism had become a serious problem with various modus operandi. In many cases, the ‘recruiters’ of the underage girls or boys are family and friends. This has made law enforcement even more difficult. Based on observations, perpetrators often received help from so-called facilitators: pimps, parents and aides, who prostituted or exploited children, as well as from travel agencies, drivers and hotel staff.
The life of Indonesian child prostitutes was portrayed in a photo exhibition titled “Daughters of the Night” by Alexandra Radu in Sanur, a photojournalist from Romania. The photos, taken from July to early October, captured the situation of child victims of sexual exploitation.