West Java’s Bogor regency is set to ban kawin kontrak (contractual marriage) — a legal and religious loophole used to justify prostitution involving tourists as clients in the hilly resort town of Puncak.
Bogor Regent Ade Yasin announced today the regency’s plan to issue a ban on the practice. The move came after a meeting (ijtima ulama) held by the Bogor chapter of the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), who urged the local government to issue a Regional Regulation (Perda) on the matter, though the specific form of regulation has yet to be formally decided.
In December 2019, the local government noted at least six villages as the main locations for contract marriages in Puncak. Ade claimed that the practice is no longer prevalent in those areas since the onset of COVID-pandemic amid the lack of tourists.
“Kawin kontrak is usually conducted by seasonal foreign tourists who stay for two-three months here. But they can’t do that because of COVID-19 pandemic, because they can’t enter freely. So the practice has decreased greatly,” Ade said.
“We’re safe for now, hopefully it will be the same going forward. We’ll continue to keep an eye on [kawin kontrak] so that it doesn’t happen again.”
Furthermore, Ade said the government will not hesitate to impose criminal sanctions if similar practices are found in the future, because she considered kawin kontrak as no different from prostitution.
In practice, kawin kontrak refers to sexual transactions between tourists, mostly Middle Eastern men, and sex workers in Puncak. More often than not, as a guise to avoid the sins of extramarital sex in Islam, clients enter into a contract marriage with the sex workers for several days.
Parts of Puncak have been dominated by Middle Eastern tourists in recent years, with kawin kontrak being one of the main draws for men from the region according to reports on the subject that date back decades.
In 2006, then-Vice President Jusuf Kalla infamously encouraged the practice, saying that, “children left behind will have good genes [from their Arab fathers] and they can become soap opera stars.” In reality, however, there have been serious concerns about the welfare of the sex workers, particularly if they were forced to raise children resulting from their contract marriages on their own.
