February 4, 2004
An Australian woman is rescuing the
Kuta bombing's latest victims: children traded for sex by poverty-stricken
families. Eric Ellis reports
Gloria Goodwin has never regarded Bali as a paradise. But then, during
her five years on the island this Perth woman has emerged as a tireless
volunteer social worker, Goodwin's seen things most Australian visitors never
do, and would never want to: abject poverty, brazen corruption and then, in
October 2002, the horror of the Kuta bombings.
But it's exposing the cancerous phenomenon that is feeding on all these problems
– paedophilia – that most exercises the 50-something Goodwin, based in the
northern town of Lovina, far from Bali's wealthier tourist centres of the south.
It's in Bali's north that western paedophiles have long preyed on villages,
traditionally the source of so many of Bali's tourism workers but now, since the
bombs devastated the island's economy, thrown into overnight penury.
"The bomb made the paedophile problem worse," she explains. "It was a simple matter of economics; people got thrown out of work, they needed the money, and there were accommodating European men to help them."
Goodwin and fellow members of Bali's Committee Against Sexual Abuse have compiled bulging files on scores of paedophiles, but previously have struggled to interest officials.
"They seemed to be very much of the mindset that they wished this was happening somewhere else, that they didn't have to deal with it," she says.
Things may be changing. The arrival as the island's police chief of Made Pastika, the corruption-busting officer who led the bombing investigations, heartens the group. Goodwin says the recent arrest of former Australian diplomat William Brown suggests Pastika's force is at last serious about cleaning up Bali. "But it's a very, very big job, and they need everyone's help."