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January 27, 2010
Bramantyo Prijosusilo
There is No Quick Fix for the Complex Problem of Jakarta's Street Children
My foreign friends thought I must have been joking when I copy and pasted a recent news story onto my Facebook status - the Jakarta Police's plan to round up street kids and inspect their anuses to determine whether they had been sodomized. A day after the plan was announced, journalists talked to street children who make a living by busking on Jakarta buses, and all of them were positively terrified.
Most told the reporters that they would stay in the makeshift shelters they called home and avoid working on the days of the raids. Some were worried that the inspections would hurt. At first, the public did not appeared angry or enraged by the proposal to inspect the children, apparently by force, but it was not long before wiser voices were raised and the authorities backed down.
An educator said the police plan was sadistic. They said they were not really going to graphically inspect the children, rather they were only going to register them for their own safety in the aftermath of the arrest of a serial killer who preyed on young boys living on the s treet. As the discussion about the children moved along and became a source of comment in the media, the Ministry of Social Affairs boldly proclaimed that by next year there would be no more street children in Jakarta.
Our 1945 Constitution states that the poor and destitute in society are to be looked after by the state, but in reality we know the state does little to help the impoverished and vulnerable. When a high-ranking government official visits a town here in East Java, it is common practice for the authorities to round up the crazy and the destitute and get them out of sight.
These victims are often dumped in the middle of nowhere to fend for themselves. Recently, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited the small East Java town of Ngawi, and the first sign of his visit was a truckload of mentally ill people being taken away temporarily from Ngrambe subdistrict. Some were later helped by local villagers. Some wandered off and others stayed, eventually becoming a burden on the local community.
In the 1990s, some street kids in Yogyakarta, with the help of local activists, published a magazine called "Jerit Jalanan" ("Cries of the Street"), and through it they expressed themselves. Their biggest fear at the time was being rounded up by the authorities, thrown onto trucks and taken away or detained.
The recent episode in Ngrambe illustrates that little has changed in the last two decades. Street children and vulnerable adults are still worth less than cattle to some authorities. The Jakarta Police's idea to inspect street children's private parts as a way to catch pedophiles and serial killers is another example of how the authorities fail to see the poor and infirm as human beings who have rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
The Ministry of Social Affairs' plan to get children off the street by training them in handicrafts shows how even well-meaning ideas can betray a level of ignorance.
The idea that Jakarta will be free of street children next year just because kids learn a craft is simply impossible and fails to grasp reality.
A street child has both freedom and money to spend. A cute boy or even m ore so, a girl on the street can earn more money begging or busking than a hard-working male adult tending a rice field in a village. Street children are used to having cash to spend, more so even than many middle-class kids.
There is no reason why a street child would prefer sitting in a classroom to riding the buses armed with a ukulele. If children from stable homes knew of the freedom and money that street kids have, they might also be tempted by life on the street.
When these lost children begin to grow up, they sometimes find they earn less as adults than they used to. A child selling newspapers at a traffic light might be told to keep the change by motorists, but an adult with years of hardship tattooed on his face is unlikely even to make a sale.
Therefore, adults who have grown up on the streets often exploit children just like Fagin took advantage of Oliver Twist and his friends in Charles Dickens' Victorian England. The man they call " B abe, the alleged serial killer of street children who was recently arrested in Jakarta, was a Fagin-type character who exploited the children he pretended to protect. He himself was once a sexually abused street child.
These are the type of people that the police wanted to find with their proposal to probe the bodies of street children. Sadly, with their good intentions they also exposed an inhumane attitude towards people who live on the street.
Street children live in communities - not just in the capital but throughout Java. Their networks span the island because following the train tracks is their favorite mode of transportation. To find out who the nasty Fagin characters are, you do not need Sherlock Holmes; elementary deductive logic and observation would suffice. There was never any need to round up the children.
Because the Constitution declares that the welfare of the poor and helpless is the responsibility of the state, the government must study street people closely to find ways to integrate them into society humanely. People living on the streets are neither vermin nor trash, and they should not be treated as such.
There is no quick fix to the problem of poor people who live on the streets, including children. There is no way that anyone can snap their fingers and make thousands of street children simply disappear. We need to better welfare systems in the villages and cities to prevent people from being forced onto the street by poverty.
But to simply promise that there will be no more street children in Jakarta is careless and cruel.
Bramantyo Prijosusilo is an artist, poet and organic farmer in Ngawi, East Java.
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