The owner of an Islamic boarding school in Indonesia was convicted Tuesday of raping 13 of his underage students — fathering nine children with his victims — and was sentenced to life in prison.
A court in the city of Bandung on the island of Java found Herry Wirawan, 36, guilty of raping the girls, ages 11 to 16, repeatedly and systematically over a period of five years.
The allegations against Mr. Herry outraged Indonesians and focused national attention on the issue of child protection at privately run religious schools, which number in the tens of thousands. Officials said President Joko Widodo had been following the case closely.
The three-judge panel decided against imposing the death penalty and chemical castration, as the prosecution had sought. President Joko signed a regulation in 2020 allowing for the chemical castration of convicted child rapists.
Mr. Herry, who had taught Arabic at an elementary school, founded the all-girl Madani Boarding School, or pesantren, in Bandung in 2016 and attracted students from poor families by offering scholarships.
The rapes came to light last year after one of the victims returned home and her family discovered she was pregnant.
Eight of the girls became pregnant — one of them twice — and gave birth to nine children. The babies were delivered at a local clinic or the homes of midwives and then cared for by Mr. Herry’s parents and sisters, said his attorney, Ira Margaretha Mambo.
The oldest of the children is not yet 5, she said.
Mr. Herry pleaded with the court for leniency as the sole provider for his wife and their two children.
In their verdict, the judges concluded that Mr. Herry, who also taught religion at the school, had brainwashed the students so effectively that “they couldn’t even distinguish right from wrong.”
Mr. Herry groomed his victims, the court found, by isolating them from their families, making them depend on him as their provider and giving them security and comfort.
“They are too young to understand the process of what they were getting,” the judges concluded. “The girls even seem to feel they owe him a debt of gratitude.”
In seducing the girls, the judges said, Mr. Herry would start by asking for a massage and then tell his victim that he could not have sex with his wife because she did not want to have many children.
He also told the girls that their teacher must be “obeyed and respected,” the judges found. If his victims resisted, he would tear off their clothes.
When one student told Mr. Herry she was pregnant, he told her she did not need an abortion because he would take responsibility for the baby.
He promised other girls that he would pay for their education and, in at least one case, he told a victim he would marry her.
The judges said the life sentence was not intended as revenge against the defendant but was aimed at protecting the public from similar crimes in the future.
The case, which highlighted the widespread problem of sexual harassment and abuse of women in Indonesia, has renewed calls for passage of legislation aimed at reducing sexual violence and the harassment of women. Women’s rights activists say that Indonesia’s existing laws don’t adequately protect women, and they have pushed for nearly a decade to win passage of the measure.
In 2019, a school bookkeeper who recorded her boss’s lewd phone call as proof she was being harassed was ordered by Indonesia’s Supreme Court to serve at least six months in prison for distributing obscene material. Her boss, the school principal, went unpunished and instead was promoted repeatedly. President Joko later granted her amnesty.
