Intimacy in transit: young refugees and their relationships with older women in Indonesia

BY Antje Missbach and Danau Tanu

Over the last two decades, Indonesia has become a transit country for thousands of refugees, from Afghanistan and many other countries. Even though refugees hope to transit through Indonesia quickly, more often than not they end up staying there for many years. The majority of refugees who come to Indonesia tend to be young—usually in their teens and twenties—and many come to Indonesia without their families.

Thus, many embark on their journey to seek asylum at the same time that they are transitioning into adulthood, which often represents a difficult stage of life for many young people, even those in relatively privileged contexts. Learning to lead a self-directed life as an adult requires skills and resources that go beyond simply earning a living. Part of the developmental experience during this stage of life also involves intimacy and sexuality.

Compared to those who are privileged, forced migration and life as refugee compound the challenges faced by young refugees due to the changes in environment and culture, as well as the criminalisation of activities that are usually considered normal—such as earning a living, marrying, etc.—that often lead to difficult financial circumstances. In our paper, we show that young, male refugees in Indonesia lack many basic rights, including the right to work and earn a living, which affect their choices for intimate partners during their life in transit.

Over the years, as we conducted research in Indonesia on various aspects of refugee life, we came to learn that some young male refugees forge intimate relationships with older Indonesian women and, to a lesser extent, Indonesian men. Even though many young refugees did not want to talk openly about such relationships, their friends would happily engage in gossiping, joking and teasing about this topic.

Public perception of these age-dissimilar relationships generally fluctuates between social panic or pity—these young refugees are often either labelled as moral transgressors or victims of sexual exploitation. Both labels create, however, more disempowerment and stigmatization.

Researching intimacy is, however, never an easy task. More than with any other research project, it takes more time to build enough rapport with the refugees for them to be able to share their stories due to a sense of shame or shyness. Not only is talking about intimate desires and motives a difficult quest, but certain emotions are hard to access through interviews or conversations. Besides the age and gender difference between us and our research participants, there were other complicating factors, including ethical considerations, class, mobility privileges, and racialized stereotyping.

Based on our ethnographic explorations, we found that intimate relationships between young male refugees and older Indonesian women are often much more complex than a mere exchange of intimacy for money as public perceptions would assume. Instead of sex work, they might be better understood through the more nuanced lens of “intimate labor.” While some intimate encounters are non-recurring, we learned that that some extended relationships with Indonesians women help young male refugees do not only to alleviate their economic precariousness and afford a more consumerist lifestyle. These relationships also help the refugees to overcome the loneliness, existential boredom, and hopelessness that characterize their prolonged waiting times in Indonesia. Many simply do not know when they will be resettled to a country in the Global North, or whether they will be able to at all.

For us it was important to understand that transactional exchanges can coexist with intimacy in the relationships that young refugees form with older Indonesian women. Given this, it is likely that young refugee’s pursuit of such relationships is driven also by reasons beyond financial benefits and need to be understood within the broader context of youth spent in limbo. Engaging in intimate relationships also serves non-material needs as it may be one way to kill time and stave off the feeling of wasting away their youth or even achieve social adulthood.

Particularly in the case of young refugees traveling on their own, they lack guidance and control of family members. Migration can disrupt the familiar ways of life that guides young men when it comes to organizing and pursuing intimate relations. Being separated from their families and wider social networks leaves them on their own with their needs, desires outside of the control and care of the extended family. Despite the existence of 24/7 instant communication applications, it is unlikely that young migrants will discuss issues of intimacy with their parents and family left behind.

It also needs to be acknowledged that unaccompanied migration of minors and young refugees can bring new opportunities and freedom from parental control, cultural traditions and social constraints for these young people, particularly when they hail from a country with conservative social norms and values. Not least because the sexual norms and values of their former societies are less likely to be reinforced in the host society, young migrants are freer to choose their friends and intimate partners, experiment with their sexuality and sexual identity, as well as sexual liberations.

Being stuck in limbo—as youth refugees in Indonesia—there is also a risk of being stuck in a protracted stage of liminality between adolescence and adulthood, such as being in an intimate relationship that sustains imbalance and dependency. Young men might become adults according to their age but do not move on to live adult lives prescribed by their culture of origin. Future research should focus in more detail on the interlinkages between intimacy and migration, specifically how the transition from childhood to adulthood affects and is affected by the ever-increasing criminalisation of their migration.