A thousand more women work at hundreds of smaller brothels in neighbouring Jarak. Most of the women hail from impoverished rural areas of East Java, a region of Muslim-majority Indonesia famous for its Islamic boarding schools. Rismaharini, 52, who was elected in , has not only revived the fortunes of a once-struggling city.
She has also joined the pantheon of new Indonesian leaders known for clean, can-do governance. Rismaharini believes so. Surabaya city government provided training in cooking, hairdressing and other skills to sex workers in , said its public relations department. Some were given 3 million rupiah pounds to encourage them to return home and start small businesses. At dusk, the call to prayer from a neighbourhood mosque is drowned out by music booming from competing brothels.
Its narrow streets are grim but bustling. Pimps wave down passing men into smoky rooms where young woman sit in glassed-off areas, playing with their cellphones until chosen by a customer.
Meme, 27, started working at Dolly three years ago after her husband died in a traffic accident. She takes her customers to a dimly lit room just big enough for a grubby mattress. A tap and plastic bucket serve as a bathroom. Of this, she gets less than half; the brothel owner gets the rest. Meme uses her share to pay for the education of her six-year-old daughter, who lives with her parents in Madiun, a four-hour drive south of Surabaya.
It was not only sex workers who opposed the mayor, she said. Dolly has a thriving ancillary economy of food and drink stalls, minimarts, parking lots and laundries. This took them away from localized outreach programmes designed to tackle the spread of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases, she said. Girls were sucked into underage sex work and boys into pimping, she said. She rejected reports that sex workers from brothels she had closed were moving to towns and cities elsewhere in East Java.
