Life is Healthy

Jakarta Globe, Nurfika Osman, March 18, 2010

Thirteen children who were allegedly sexually abused by a man in their village in Depok will receive trauma treatment from the National Commission for Child Protection to prevent them from possibly becoming pedophiles in the future.

“The treatment is very important as we have to make them recover after they experienced sexual violence,” said Arist Merdeka Sirait, the secretary general of the commission, also known as Komnas Anak.

“We do not want them to suffer trauma or do the same thing to another child when they are older,” he said, adding that commission officials went to the homes of the 13 victims in Lio Village on Thursday to talk to their parents and prepare for the counseling.

Of the 13 children, all are boys except for one 9-year-old girl. They range in age from 5 to 14 years old, and they were sexually abused over a time period ranging from two weeks to seven months.

“The oldest victim is a 14-year-old boy who has been abused for seven months and he is the nephew of the perpetrator,” Arist said.

The suspect, Yohanes, a parking attendant who was living in his brother-in-law’s house, was arrested on Tuesday by Depok Police and could be charged for violating the Law on Child Protection, with a maximum penalty of 15 years in jail.

Arist said Yohanes would ask children to play a ball game with him when his brother-in-law was not home. If the children lost, they had to engage in sexual acts with him. Arist said all 13 children had given similar accounts of abuse.

Debri Pristinella, a lecturer at Pelita Harapan University’s psychology department, told the Jakarta Globe that it was possible for victims of sexual abuse to become pedophiles themselves later in life, particularly if they experienced pleasure while they were being harassed.

“Therapy is important so that we can make them understand that what they have experienced is a wrong thing,” Debri said. “The root is that the children, especially when they were still very young, do not understand that what happened to them was categorized as violence.”

She said that if children were molested when they were young, it was hard for them to understand it as an act of violence.

“And this is the most dangerous thing as it is an unseen impact,” she said.