It is a religious symbol out of sync with her surroundings, a seedy Kuta nightclub, where a young man has an arm wrapped around her slight frame. Dinda says the tattoo is there to remind her of who she used to be - the woman she was before she started selling her body for sex. However, her forearm also carries a different reminder, scars from where she tried to commit suicide with a broken bottle. Follow Anthony DeCeglie on Twitter: anthdeceglie Dinda's story, which she shared with The Sunday Times, is an increasingly common one in Bali, which reigns supreme as the favourite holiday destination for West Australians.
Behind the beach resorts, the shops and the stalls selling cheap CDs and fake watches is a putrid underbelly of crime, prostitution and poverty. It's hard to miss if you venture into the pubs and clubs after dark, where the prostitutes often outnumber the patrons.
Yet most travellers turn a blind eye to it. Dinda, 28, was forced into the sex trade after her family perished in the tsunami. They were living in Banda Aceh, on the island of Sumatra, when it struck. Dinda lost all her immediate family. If I don't drink then I'm not confident. That can buy pretty much anything. I slept with the husband while the wife watched," she said. Dinda has been physically abused several times - punched, kicked and even choked.
At times she says she has feared for her life. She tries to steer clear of older men because they remind her too much of her father. And she has a strict no-Arabs policy. Most of her clients are Australians. She said one of the biggest problems was that many locals were too naive to know how to protect themselves from pedophiles, who were jetting into Bali from far and wide. They don't think that a tourist could be using them or could abuse them. Many were not aware of contraceptive measures.
Meanwhile, victims of the sex trade, including young children, are not offered meaningful counselling because it is not part of Indonesian culture. For them, the best medicine is to just not think about it. She recently travelled to a remote village near Denpasar where several young boys were molested by a German tourist six years ago.
