Urban Vulnerability, the Right to the City, and Ecovocation: Migrant Women in Covert Spa-Based Sex Work in Jakarta

Cities are often imagined as places of endless opportunity, where a person can leave a struggling village and find a better life. But for many who arrive, the city is also a place where risks are piled up unevenly. Some people arrive with the documents, education, and money needed to turn a city's growth into a secure job and a safe home. Others arrive with nothing but the need to survive, finding themselves pushed into work that is hidden, dangerous, and unprotected. This is the reality for a specific group of women in Jakarta, Indonesia: migrants who work in small, unregistered spas where sexual services are sometimes offered in secret. A new study looks closely at their lives to understand how different kinds of hardship—money, laws, social shame, and even the quality of the air and water they breathe—stack up to make their situation so fragile. The researchers are not just listing these problems; they are trying to build a new way of thinking about education and rights that could help these women navigate a city that often treats them as invisible.

The study, conducted by researchers from the State University of Jakarta and Universitas Islam Syekh Yusuf, does not present new interviews or fresh fieldwork. Instead, it takes a deep, second look at material gathered in a previous research program. The team re-examined stories from eight migrant women working in these covert spa settings, along with accounts from legal advocates, academics, and community leaders who work with them. By listening carefully to these voices again, the researchers identified six specific ways these women are vulnerable. These are not separate issues that happen one after another; they are like layers of a heavy coat that make it harder to move. The first layer is economic: many women arrived in Jakarta because they lost their jobs or needed to send money home, leaving them with no time to look for better options. The second is labor: once they found work in the spas, they faced unclear pay, long hours without extra pay, and no written contracts. The third is legal: when police raids occurred, the women were often the ones taken away, while the owners of the spas remained untouched, and the women had no one to help them with the law.

The fourth layer is symbolic, which is a fancy word for how people see and treat you. The women described how friends and neighbors would turn away from them once they learned where they worked, leaving them isolated and ashamed. The fifth layer is citizenship, but not in the sense of having a passport. These women were physically present in the city and working hard, yet they felt they had no real right to be there. They could not demand safety, decent housing, or a voice in how their neighborhood was run. The final layer is environmental. The women lived in crowded, poorly built housing near polluted rivers. They spoke of floods that blocked their path to work, dirty water that made them sick, and the constant exhaustion of living in a dirty, unsafe environment. The study suggests that these six layers interact to create a trap. A woman might be so worried about paying a debt that she takes a job with no contract; because she has no contract, she cannot complain if she is not paid; because she is afraid of being arrested, she cannot go to the police; and because she lives in a flood-prone area, she loses days of work when the water rises. Each problem makes the others worse.

To make sense of this tangled web of difficulties, the researchers proposed a new idea they call "ecovocation." This is not a magic solution or a single class that fixes everything. Instead, it is a framework for education that connects five different kinds of learning to the five main problems the women face. First, to help with the confusion about jobs and the city, they need "critical urbanization literacy," which means learning how the city really works, where the risks are, and what jobs are actually available. Second, to deal with the pollution and flooding, they need "environmental justice literacy," which teaches them that their poor living conditions are not just bad luck, but a result of how the city is built and who gets protected. Third, to handle the unfair pay and lack of legal help, they need "legal and labor literacy," so they know their rights and where to go for help. Fourth, to overcome the shame and the lack of options, they need "non-stigmatizing vocational empowerment," which means training for jobs that are real, safe, and do not carry a social stigma. Finally, to fix the feeling of being an outsider, they need "citizenship advocacy," which helps them learn how to speak up and demand a fair place in the city.

The researchers are very clear about what they have and have not done. They have not proven that this new educational approach works. They have not tested it in a real classroom or shown that it leads to better jobs or safer neighborhoods. What they have done is build a solid map of the problem based on real stories, and then drawn a blueprint for a solution that fits that map. They argue that current ways of helping these women often fail because they treat the problems separately. A program might teach women to recycle, ignoring that they are too tired from working double shifts to care about the environment. Another program might teach them to read, but not teach them how to read a labor contract or understand their rights. This new approach suggests that to truly help, education must connect the environment, the law, the job market, and the right to be a citizen into one coherent whole.

The study also pushes back against some common ideas about migration and work. It rejects the notion that these women are simply victims with no choice, or that they are entirely free agents making bad decisions. Instead, the researchers describe their situation as "constrained agency." This means the women are making choices, but they are making them in a room with very few doors. They are not choosing to work in dangerous conditions because they want to; they are choosing the least bad option available to them when their education, their money, and their social standing have been stripped away. The study also clarifies that these women are not necessarily victims of human trafficking in the legal sense, though they are certainly exploited. The focus is on the structural conditions of the city that make exploitation possible, rather than just blaming individual bad actors.

Ultimately, this paper is a call to see the city differently. It asks us to understand that for a migrant woman working in a hidden spa, the water in her tap, the price of her rent, the fear of a police raid, and the shame of her neighbors are all part of the same story. You cannot fix one without addressing the others. The researchers suggest that if we want to build a city that is truly safe and fair for everyone, we need to stop treating environmental issues, labor rights, and social inclusion as separate problems. We need to see them as a single, interconnected system. The "ecovocation" framework is their way of saying that education should be the tool that helps people untangle that system, giving them the knowledge and the confidence to claim a better life. It is a proposal, not a finished product, but it offers a clear path forward for how we might think about helping the most vulnerable people in our cities.