Dominant Positionings and Paradoxical Mobilities: Child Migrants in Java, Indonesia

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the diverse mobilities and agency of marginalized children and young people growing up in Java, Indonesia, who migrate to the city seeking escape, employment, and adventure. To argue that young people's lives are constrained or dictated by poverty or hardship, is to refute their agency and implies that they are unable to desire or seek signs of modernity or the status that is attached to their mobility. The chapter is based on multisited participatory research with young male and female migrants working in the precarious informal economy and on the streets of Java. It explores how their realities contradict the dominant constructions of childhood, child labor, child migration, and "trafficking," and challenge the expectations of mainstream society and the protectionist discourses of nation states and the international aid sector. The chapter untangles the paradoxical realities embedded in the mobilities of migrant and adolescent identities, questioning the way child migration is viewed by dominant privileged groups. By highlighting the structural disadvantage and the resilience of patriarchy as contributing factors to migrant children's reality, the chapter calls for a radical cultural shift away from the universalistic, moralistic construction of child migrants, towards an interrogation of the dominant neoliberal forces that underpin their exploitation and control.