Special report: Former workers at Jodie O’Shea House – named after a Bali bombing victim – say children are brought from remote villages to help solicit donations

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

An orphanage using the name of an Australian Bali bombing victim has been accused of sourcing children with living parents from a remote island to help solicit donations from western tourists.

Former workers at Jodie O’Shea House, one of Bali’s biggest institutions for children, made a detailed complaint about its activities to Save the Children, which passed it on to Indonesian authorities.

The owners strongly denied the allegations in the complaint, and Indonesia’s social affairs ministry was unable to verify the most serious claims when it carried out an inspection.

The Indonesian government said it was continuing to monitor the institution and the ministry has requested a further report from local officials.

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The centre was founded as the Jodie O’Shea Orphanage in 2005. Its British founder, Alison Chester, said she named it after O’Shea, whom she had visited as the 29-year-old Sydneysider lay dying in hospital after the 2002 Bali attacks.

It now houses 94 children and has become a prime destination for well-meaning Australian and other western tourists.

Former volunteers and staff, in interviews with the Guardian, said up to five tour groups could be moved through the orphanage each day, bringing donations, potential sponsorships, food and gifts.

Only a handful of the children are orphans, despite the institution marketing itself as an orphanage for more than a decade.

Chester confirmed only six of the children were without both parents, 64 had a single parent living, 14 had both parents alive and 10 were described as “special cases”. She said she had never hidden the fact that some children had parents, and the centre’s website carried that information.

In recent months, as pressure mounted in the Australian parliament to stop orphanage tourism, the institution rebranded itself as Jodie O’Shea House. The word “orphanage” has been removed from parts of its website.

Allegations of volunteers denied

Many of the children in the centre are from Sumba, a poor island about 500km east of Bali.



In the official complaint to Save the Children, former volunteers alleged the children had become institutionalised and showed clear signs of distress. The constant tourist visits robbed them of privacy and independence, they said.



There was little to no one-on-one supervision, and the children generally relied on older residents for help, the volunteers said.

“There have been times where I have left there and just cried the rest of the day,” Sarah*, one former volunteer, told Guardian Australia.



“We love those kids so much. To see them crying hysterically or acting out with anger or misbehaviour is extremely hard to deal with, especially when you have to leave. You get on the plane home not knowing who will be there next and what kind of care they are going to get when you aren’t there.”

Melissa* said she was left distressed by her experience at Jodie O’Shea.

“I grieved over this, because I was so invested in helping these children and their development,” she said.

“It was the hardest day of my life leaving without saying a proper goodbye. I just couldn’t be a part of JOS any more as I felt like they do not have the children’s welfare as their first priority.”

The formal complaint alleged the centre was operating without a proper licence, and helped facilitate an adoption to a western tourist.

Most of the children that go still have parents here Umbu Tangar, a resident of Sumba

The Guardian has seen photos of the baby who was allegedly adopted and a copy of the passport of a Canadian man who staff said took the child.



“The baby was just gone,” a former worker, Tim*, said. “Someone very quickly adopted the baby. I think he is from Canada, and I’m not happy with that part.”

The complaint also alleged lax child protection measures were putting children at risk. Tourists had been able to take children on unaccompanied trips away from the orphanage, the complaint said.

Chester has denied most of the claims. She told Guardian Australia the children had been brought to the institution by parents who were unable to care for them.

“The parents brought the children to us,” she said. “They are destitute and children arrive malnourished, very thin and little or no schooling at all. Their access to school is extremely difficult.”

She said the centre had never operated without a legal permit, had strong child protection policies and did not make a profit. It also helped provide essential services on Sumba.

“We have installed over a period of years more than 20 wells,” she said. “Last year we completed a further six, and this year we will be installing another six wells.”

She “totally disagreed” with any suggestion the children were in distress. She said local police frequently brought children to the centre and she denied any wrongdoing in helping facilitate an adoption.

“We have only ever assisted with one adoption whereby a baby was brought to us, and as we do not hold any adoption licences we passed the case to an adoption lawyer,” she said.

The Guardian visited Sumba and found most families had sent their children away hoping for a better education for them.

One mother, Novi Anaawa, said she last saw her son in 2007. Otniel was 11 when they agreed to send him away.

A rice farmer from Tanarara, a small village in central Sumba, Anaawa told herself she was making the best decision for his future. At Jodie O’Shea Otniel would get an education and have better opportunities than she had, she believed. Besides, several children from Tanarara were already there.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Children playing in Jodie O’Shea House, one of the biggest institutions for children in Bali. Photograph: -

“All of us have children there,” Anaawa told the Guardian. “From elementary to high school, they finance their education.”

Otniel is now 21. After eight years at Jodie O’Shea he finished high school and after graduating got a job in a Bali car wash. He still hasn’t made it home, even when his father died three years ago. Anaawa occasionally speaks to him on the phone

Life is simple in Tanarara. Like Anaawa, most villagers are rice farmers who live in wooden shacks with bamboo porches.

Sumba is part of East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) province, a cluster of islands that are among the poorest and least developed in Indonesia. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the poverty rate in NTT was 19.82% in 2014, compared with 11.25% nationally, making it the third highest in the country after the provinces of Papua and West Papua.

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Almost 40% of people over the age of 10 in NTT have either not attended or not completed primary school, according to data taken by the Bureau of Statistics in 2010.

Over the years Anaawa has been invited to visit Otniel in Bali, but she didn’t have the money to catch a boat or plane there. A return flight from Bali to Sumba costs about A$200.

Interviews in Tanarara – where the NGO affiliated with Jodie O’Shea House has built a community well – suggest about 12 children from the village have gone to the Bali home. Most were not orphans.



“There is one or two that don’t have parents, but most of the children that go still have parents here,” said Umbu Tangar, a Tanarara resident.

Kongawandal Atu, a 62-year-old grandmother, agreed. Her family sent a young relative to Jodie O’Shea in 2014, also for economic reasons.

“They do look for orphans, but also those who have a weak economic situation,” Anaawa said. “So those that are recruited are not always orphans but from low economic backgrounds.”

Chester said the centre organised regular trips to Sumba for the children, and encouraged them to stay in touch with their parents.

“Children from Sumba are taken back to their village annually and we alternate children so they all go every two years accompanied by a staff member,” she said. “Children are with us until they finish school. We then also assist them in work training, providing accommodation and financial support for three months.”

Campaigns against orphanage tourism

The most recent evidence suggests that, even when well run, orphanages are harmful for children. Institutional care is more likely to cause developmental delays, reactive attachment disorders, behavioural issues, reduced intellectual capability and poor physical health, compared with community-based or familial care.



Such concerns have prompted campaigns against orphanage tourism in developing countries by Save the Children, Unicef, Friends International and an alliance known as ReThink Orphanages. They argue that donations and volunteering resources should go instead towards community-based care and family reunification and support.

Kate van Doore, a law and human trafficking expert at Griffith University in Queensland, said evidence about the harms of institutional care was overwhelming.



“Orphanages are simply no place for children long term,” Van Doore said. “They should only be used as a temporary measure where children are awaiting family-based or kinship care, or under extreme circumstances.

“Once the orphanage is there, there’s a continual cycle of needing children to be institutionalised to keep the orphanage running. But it’s not a good way of caring for children long term.”

The complaint about Jodie O’Shea House was made in January 2017, and the Indonesian social affairs ministry sent national- and provincial-level officials to visit it on 24 March.

Officials were unable to verify the most serious claims made in the report, said Nahar, the social rehabilitation director at Indonesia’s social affairs ministry.



“There did not appear to be any problems with the services provided at the orphanage at the time of the visit,” he told the Guardian.



I have seen visitors go into the children’s rooms while they are studying, sleeping, getting dressed Former volunteer Sarah

However, Nahar confirmed that provincial authorities were continuing to monitor Jodie O’Shea House, and the ministry had sought a further report from the provincial social services office in Bali.



One fault officials did find during the March visit was an incomplete operational permit. The ministry said the correct permit was now being processed.

Tata Sudrajat, from Save the Children, said it was common practice for orphanages in Indonesia to take in poor children who still had parents.

“Actually this is the general situation of many orphanages in Indonesia, that they are not orphans,” he said. “Some institutions might say the children are orphans so they can attract more donations.”

Former volunteers said Jodie O’Shea had pumped more and more tourists through its doors in recent years.

“It used to be a lot stricter with the visiting hours. No weekends. No late nights. You have to book well in advance; you couldn’t just rock up,” Sarah said. “The kids at least had a few days off from visitors coming in and out of their home.”

Sarah said the orphanage was now more like a zoo.

“I have seen visitors go into the children’s rooms while they are studying, sleeping, getting dressed etc. They have no privacy whatsoever,” she said.

“There are no boundaries as to what visitors can do while they are there or where they can go. They can walk by the bathrooms and see the kids having showers, or walk in the room while they are in the middle of a private tutoring session.”

Most groups give donations or donated goods, usually food or household items. Others agree to child sponsorship of up to US$1,200 (A$1,500) a year.

John*, another volunteer, believed the orphanage was making significant profits, a claim strongly denied by Chester.

“There is no profit. We are a non-profit. All donations go towards the [Jodie O’Shea] House,” she said.



Sarah said money donated towards sponsoring the children could have gone a long way to helping keep families together and improving education standards in places such as Sumba.

“If they were supported in their village, that would have such an amazing impact on eradicating the poverty from that part of Indonesia and there would be no need to bring them to places like this and away from their families,” she said.

In December a cross-party parliamentary inquiry in Australia called for new measures to regulate and restrict orphanage tourism. The inquiry recommended introducing modern slavery laws, which would cover orphanage tourism.

Chester wrote a submission to the inquiry, warning it not to prevent Australians from “taking a personal financial interest in improving the lives of children”.

“To suggest that children are harmed in all forms of institutional care is a step too far. Please do not tar everyone with the same brush,” she wrote.

* The names of former volunteers and staff have been changed to protect their identities.

