Cross-Border and Quarantine Enforcement in Protecting Women and Children from Trafficking

Abstract

This study aims to analyse how cross-border and quarantine enforcement can be strengthened to protect women and children from human trafficking in Indonesia, a country whose archipelagic geography makes its borders, ports, and remote crossings strategic for transnational organised crime. A normative legal method was employed, combining statutory, conceptual, and comparative approaches based on primary legal materials and peer-reviewed journals. The findings show that human trafficking frequently converges with the smuggling of migrants and the illegal trafficking of wildlife and biological resources, sharing the same routes, networks, and enforcement gaps at the border. Yet the agencies stationed at that frontier—immigration, customs, and the quarantine authority—operate in fragmented silos, so that vulnerable women and children move through the same checkpoints as illicit goods without being detected. Examined through the value of justice and the objectives of Islamic law—the preservation of life (ḥifẓ al-nafs) and of the environment (ḥifẓ al-bīʼah)—the study concludes that an integrated, victim-centred border-management system, supported by transnational cooperation, would better protect women and children while also safeguarding the nation’s biological wealth.