'A little but enough': street children's subcultures in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Harriot Beazley

doi:10.25911/5d78db149c5f7

This thesis is an examination of how street children in Indonesia are living on the edge of society and face multiple forms of social and spatial exclusion in their everyday lives. Homeless street children have often experienced alienation from their homes and families, and discrimination when working on the streets. In Indonesia they are perceived to be 'out of place', and to be committing a social violation by transgressing that which is considered to be appropriate behaviour. Consequently, they are stigmatised through a discourse of deviance, and physically removed from public spaces by state 'cleansing' operations which involve arrests, imprisonment and, in some cases, torture. The majority of Yogyakarta's street children are boys, although the numbers of girls are growing. In the thesis I show how despite their social and spatial oppression, boys and girls living on the streets are not passive victims. Instead, they have found multiple and resourceful ways to earn money and exercise their own agency from the margins of the world economy, and from the periphery of gendered power relations. This has been by 'winning spaces' in the city where they can survive and exist, and by constructing their own communities or urban subcultures within Indonesian society. The thesis examines the spatial expressions of the street kid subcultures, including territorial issues; how the children identify with particular areas for different activities; and how their identities, including their sexual identities. shift in relation to their social and spatial settings. The analysis also explains the process of socialisation to the street-child world, and how the children have developed their own code of ethics, norms, values, hierarchies, language and bodily styles, which have emerged as a way to resist and subvert their imposed exclusion in the world. Finally, I explain how for many street kids 'home' is yet another 'space of exclusion', and why it is very difficult for children to return there. This includes an inquiry into the problems which adolescents face as they have to make difficult decisions in the 'liminal' period between childhood and adulthood. My research methodology in the field included informal interviews, participatory observation on the street, and PAR (Participatory Action Research) activities, including focus group discussions and the collection of spontaneous drawings and 'cognitive maps' drawn by the children. I also traced the biographical paths and changing life situations of six, key informants. In addition, I interviewed other people on the street who had interaction with the children in their daily lives, and I spent time working with non government organisations which assist street children, interviewing both the workers and children. My work contributes to the growing body of critical studies of children and geography, subcultural studies, and of street children in the "developing' and the 'developed' world. Equally important is how the children themselves directly participated in the investigation of their lives.

'A little but enough': street children's subcultures in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

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