Other publication / Published on BandungBergerak
This article examines how prostitution in West Java must be understood within the broader context of urban inequality and uneven development. While urbanization is frequently promoted as a marker of economic progress, driven by industrial expansion, infrastructure, and investment, it has simultaneously produced new forms of marginalization. Women migrating from rural areas to cities such as Bekasi, Bandung, and Bogor often encounter exclusion from formal labor markets and limited livelihood opportunities. In this context, prostitution emerges not as an isolated moral issue, but as a survival strategy shaped by structural inequality, labor precarity, and gendered vulnerabilities.
Urban development in West Java has not eliminated poverty but redistributed it. Declining agrarian livelihoods and persistent gender inequality push women into migration, yet urban economies fail to absorb them into stable employment. As a result, poverty is reconfigured across space, concentrating opportunity in certain zones while displacing vulnerability into peri-urban areas. Within these conditions, prostitution becomes one of the limited options available to women with constrained social and economic capital. Framing it solely as a matter of morality or public order obscures its structural roots and the ways it is embedded within broader political and economic systems.
This condition is reinforced by gaps in governance. Limited labor protections and weak regulatory oversight expose women to exploitation, health risks, and trafficking. Empirical data supports the structural nature of this precarity. According to Statistics Indonesia (BPS), West Java has the highest number of commercial sex workers in the country, with 79 villages and subdistricts identified in 2024, and it also ranks among the provinces with the highest unemployment rates. These patterns reflect how urban growth, when not accompanied by inclusive policies, reproduces inequality rather than resolving it.
At the same time, prostitution is closely linked to the dynamics of capitalist development. As lower-income populations are displaced from productive spaces, they are relocated into more marginal environments where livelihoods are precarious. State interventions such as raids and evictions regulate visibility without addressing underlying causes. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer, sex workers can be understood as populations that are simultaneously included in and excluded from the social order, subject to control while remaining economically functional. Prostitution also forms part of the political economy of leisure. As argued by Truong Thanh-Dam, leisure under capitalism is organized and commodified, and sexual services become embedded within systems that sustain both consumption and the reproduction of labor.
In rapidly urbanizing areas such as Bekasi, Bogor, and Bandung, prostitution is often concealed within formal economic spaces, including massage and spa services. This spatial reorganization reduces visibility while leaving structural inequalities intact. Local governance, in this sense, does not eliminate marginality but manages and redistributes it, allowing economic growth to appear orderly while underlying vulnerabilities persist.
Addressing prostitution therefore requires moving beyond moral judgment toward a structural understanding of inequality. It should be approached as a consequence of socio-economic conditions rather than an individual failing. Expanding access to stable employment, strengthening labor protections, reducing stigma, and improving access to education, healthcare, and social protection are essential steps. Without such measures, urban development will continue to reproduce the very vulnerabilities it claims to overcome.
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DEEP EnGender Author
Daniel Jeremia Natanael Nababan
Mr. Daniel Jeremia Natanael Nababan is a social researcher focusing on environmental governance and climate policy, with particular attention to European Union–ASEAN relations. His academic work examines the political dimensions of climate governance, including the mechanisms of European Union climate hegemony toward ASEAN countries and the implementation of EU forest fire policies in the post-pandemic context. He holds a Bachelor of Social Sciences in Sociology from Universitas Negeri Jakarta and a Master of Science in European Studies from Universitas Indonesia.
