Rokaya needed time to recover after illness forced her to quit as a live-in maid in Malaysia and return home to Indramayu, West Java. However, under pressure from her agent who claimed two million Rupiah for her initial placement, she accepted an offer of work in Erbil, Iraq.
“I’m willing to keep going, even if it takes forever,” says fisherman Mr. Saenudin, a trafficking survivor.
Unpaid 20-hour days
For those who become victims of trafficking, the experience is rarely positive. At SBMI’s Jakarta headquarters, fisherman Saenudin, from Java’s Thousand Islands, explained how in 2011 he signed a contract to work on a foreign fishing vessel, hoping to give his family a better life. Once at sea, he was forced to work 20-hour days hauling in nets and dividing catch and was only paid for the first three of his 24 months of gruelling labour.
In December 2013, South African authorities detained the vessel off Cape Town, where it had been fishing illegally, and held Mr. Saenudin for three months before IOM and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs helped him and 73 other Indonesian seafarers to repatriate.
In the nine years since, Mr. Saenudin has been fighting to recover 21 months of missing pay, a legal battle that forced him to sell everything he owns except his house. “The struggle tore me from my family,” he says.
An IOM survey of more than 200 prospective Indonesian fishers provided actionable insights to the government for enhancing recruitment processes, associated fees, pre-departure training, and migration management. In 2022, IOM trained 89 judges, legal practitioners, and paralegals on adjudicating trafficking in persons cases, including the application of child victim and gender-sensitive approaches, as well as 162 members of anti-trafficking task forces in East Nusa Tenggara and North Kalimantan provinces.
For Mr. Saenudin, improvements in case handling can’t come soon enough. Still, the resolve of the fisherman shows no cracks. “I’m willing to keep going, even if it takes forever,” he said.