Social networking site Facebook has been reportedly blamed by an Indonesian religious court official for growing teenage pregnancies and under-age marriages in the country.
According to an AFP report, a secretary at the religious court in Mount Kidul Siti Haryanti said that the number of under-age marriages has grown in the past year.
She said that many young couples have admitted that they began their relationship online.
Haryanti said 130 under-age couples have applied for marriage licences at the religious court this year compared to 120 couples last year.
"Many couples admitted they got to know each other through the site and continued their relationship until they got pregnant outside wedlock," Haryanti told Antara state news agency.
One of the reasons for the new trend is Facebook’s access in remote villages, she said.
"The site is easy to access even to the remote villages so intensive relationships caused many teenagers to get pregnant outside marriage," she said.
There over 20 million Facebook users in the fastest growing online market in Southeast Asia. According to a Yahoo study Internet usage grew 48% in 2010, compared to 22% in 2009.
The secretary of the Directorate General of Application of Informatics Djoko Agung Harijadi was quoted by Antara News last month that the number of Internet users in Indonesia has reached 45 million.
"Around 28 million people who access internet services are young people."
"More and more Indonesians have become internet users," he said, adding that 64% of those are youths aged between 15 and 19 years old.
In Indonesia, the legal age for marriage is 16 years for women and 19 years for men.
