Abstract
This article documents the experiences of volunteer visitors to Australia’s onshore immigration detention facilities, and considers what they reveal about the operation of power within this detention network. While immigration detention systems (including Australia’s) have received considerable academic attention in recent years, few scholars have examined the experiences of volunteers. Further, while the existing scholarship points to the negative impacts of immigration detention on detainees, the question of how these outcomes are produced at the level of daily institutional life has gone largely unanswered. The testimonies presented here provide a valuable window onto daily life in Australia’s onshore immigration detention centres, highlighting the opaque and capricious mechanisms through which they produce emotional distress in both asylum seekers and their supporters. In documenting these mechanisms and their effects, this article shows how ‘deterrence’ is enacted through the small and seemingly innocuous details of institutional life.
Keywords
In recent decades, Western governments have increasingly implemented immigration detention policies as they have sought to address the ‘problem’ of forced migration (De Bruycker and Tsourdi, 2016: 1; Kotsioni, 2016: 44). Australia’s system of mandatory detention – which is one of the strictest in the world (AHRC, 2011; Flynn, 2012: 29) – has received particular condemnation, even as proponents have presented it as a model for emulation (Juss, 2017). Australia’s Migration Act 1958 requires that all unlawful non-citizens – including maritime asylum seekers who enter Australia without authorisation – be detained indefinitely until they are removed from the country or granted a visa (AHRC, 2017: 12). This policy has seen many maritime asylum seekers held in closed detention facilities on the Australian mainland or (since 2001) in offshore processing facilities on small Pacific islands (McLoughlin and Warin, 2008: 255).
Australia’s mandatory detention policy has been widely recognised (and, indeed, explicitly framed) as an aspect of the country’s broader ‘deterrence’ policy with respect to ‘boat arrivals’. 1 Deterrence involves efforts to discourage prospective asylum seekers from travelling to Australia (‘general deterrence’), as well as attempts to make existing refugee applicants abandon their claims and return home (‘specific deterrence’) (Leerkes and Broeders, 2010). In recent years, scholars from around the world have drawn attention to government efforts to encourage asylum seekers to return ‘voluntarily’ to their country of origin, problematising the language of ‘voluntary repatriations’ by underlining the coercive nature of some such strategies (Gerver, 2017; Webber, 2011). Policies and practices that force asylum seekers into situations of isolation, destitution or despair are examples of this approach (Leerkes et al., 2016: 3; Webber, 2011: 104) and serve overarching deterrence objectives (Peterie, 2018). This article highlights some of the small and seemingly benign practices through which Australia’s onshore immigration detention facilities produce despair, showing how they serve the ‘specific deterrence’ objective by harming asylum seekers and damaging their networks of support.
Studies of detainee wellbeing from Australia and abroad indicate that while pre-migration trauma may contribute to high rates of mental illness among immigration detention populations (Kotsioni, 2016), being detained is itself a significant stressor (Robjant et al., 2009: 310). A growing body of scholarship points to a causal relationship between time in immigration detention and mental illness (Steel et al., 2006). These studies have argued that the insecurity and sense of injustice associated with arbitrary detention is damaging to detainees. Few studies, however, have considered if and how psychological pain is produced at the level of daily institutional life. In addition, the experiences and wellbeing of detention centre volunteers – who play an important role in helping detainees to endure their detention (Coffey et al., 2010) – have received negligible attention.
This article documents the experiences of volunteer visitors to Australia’s onshore immigration detention facilities and considers what they reveal about this detention system. While the experiences of asylum seekers are of primary importance, the experiences of volunteers warrant research attention for three reasons. First, they are significant because they show that immigration detention imposes human costs beyond those that have been previously documented. Detention centre volunteers, this article demonstrates, are also harmed by this system. Second, detention centre visitors are an important source of witness testimony regarding what happens in Australia’s closed detention facilities (Fleay, 2015). The testimonies presented here thus provide valuable evidence regarding the operation of power within Australia’s onshore detention network, and regarding the carceral technologies that asylum seekers and their visitors are subject to. Third, detention centre visitors are valuable lifelines for detained asylum seekers, connecting them to the outside world and offering practical and emotional care (RCOA, 2017). In this context, practices that harm volunteers or hamper these visitations erode asylum seekers’ networks of resistance and support.
This article is structured in five parts. It begins with a discussion of Australia’s immigration detention system, in which the existing scholarship regarding asylum seeker and volunteer experiences within these spaces is reviewed. This section highlights the relationship between immigration detention and mental illness, and notes that little research has investigated how detention centres inflict harm through the details of institutional life. The article then turns to review the existing scholarship concerning micro-controls in other carceral institutions, observing that such technologies have been shown to play an important role in producing psychological harm in prison settings. Against this background, the third section describes the empirical research that informs this article, and the fourth presents the study’s findings. The article concludes by arguing that the micro-controls that this article illuminates should be understood as functional aspects of Australia’s broader ‘deterrence’ policy.
Australia’s immigration detention system
Secrecy and inaccessibility play a central role in Australia’s immigration detention system, which has seen asylum seekers detained ‘on the fringes of capital cities; lost within semi-arid and desert regions, and […] on small Pacific islands’ (McLoughlin and Warin, 2008: 255). The situation is most stark in the offshore system – with even human rights organisations routinely denied access – but there is also ‘limited independent monitoring […] by formal state and non-state bodies’ (Fleay, 2015: 22) in Australia’s onshore detention network. Unlike their offshore counterparts, however, detainees in the onshore system are permitted to receive private visitors, and volunteer groups have increasingly taken advantage of this provision (RCOA, 2017).
Asylum seekers detained on the Australian mainland are rarely permitted to leave their places of detention. They feel isolated and abandoned, and boredom is a significant issue (Fleay and Briskman, 2013; Coffey et al., 2010). It is in this respect that the volunteers who enter these spaces as friends provide some relief (Coffey et al., 2010). Volunteer visitors to immigration detention facilities break the monotony of day-to-day life and offer detainees a welcome distraction; they also reassure the asylum seekers that they have not been forgotten (Coffey et al., 2010; RCOA, 2017). As a Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) report recently explained, ‘visitors are one of the few lifelines that people in detention have with the outside world’ (2017: 8).
Detainee experiences
Studies from Australia and abroad consistently find that detained asylum seekers experience high levels of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Ichikawa et al., 2006; Robjant et al., 2009). Self-harm and suicidal ideation are also common (Mares and Jureidini, 2004; Procter et al., 2013). The mental health of detainees has been found to worsen with time, such that detention duration has been positively associated with increased distress (Robjant et al., 2009; Silverman and Massa, 2012). While some studies indicate that individuals regain their mental health after release (Keller et al., 2003), there is evidence that longer periods of detention have enduring negative effects (Steel et al., 2006; Coffey et al., 2010).
At times scholars and government agencies have suggested that mental health issues are not causally related to immigration detention, instead attributing these strong correlations to negative experiences pre-migration. As Maglen summarises, such commentators have ‘insisted that the “real” problem [is] the pathologised state of merely being an asylum seeker’ (2007). Research demonstrates that psychological disorders are more common in refugee populations than in the general public, and the psychological literature has traditionally focused on pre-migration factors when considering why this is the case (Li et al., 2016). Increasingly, however, scholars have sought to isolate post-migration factors, and to identify their impact on the mental health of refugees and asylum seekers (Li et al., 2016). Such research has concluded that past detention is causally related to PTSD, depression and mental-health-related disability (Steel et al., 2006; see also Ichikawa et al., 2006; Keller et al., 2003), and that immigration detention facilities therefore constitute ‘traumatizing environment[s]’ (Newman and Steel, 2008). While studies of mental illness among asylum seekers thus suggest that detention centre environments may contribute to negative outcomes (Robjant et al., 2009: 310), few studies have directly addressed the question of whether and how psychological pain is produced in the day-to-day practices of institutional life.
Volunteer experiences
A growing body of scholarship documents the negative impacts of detention on the mental wellbeing of detainees, yet almost no research has been conducted into the effects of detention on volunteer visitors. The existing scholarship at times gestures towards the emotional costs associated with detention centre care work, but it largely glosses over the complexities and causes of these experiences. It is understandable that scholars have focused their attention on how immigration detention affects detainees. Nonetheless, the experiences of visitors also warrant attention. This is the case not only because these individual volunteers are themselves important, but also because their experiences shed light on the operation of power within detention centres, and on how these facilities function to disrupt asylum seekers’ networks of resistance and support.
While few scholars have examined volunteer experiences in immigration detention facilities, a small but important body of work is emerging regarding the emotional costs of doing paid work in these spaces. Studies have documented the toll that detention centre work takes on researchers, detention centre employees, and the professionals who enter facilities to provide assistance (see, for example, Bosworth, 2014; Puthoopparambil et al., 2015). All of the researchers who conducted fieldwork in immigration detention centres as part of the study that informed Bosworth’s 2014 book Inside Immigration Detention, for instance, ‘reported depression, anxiety, uncertainty, sadness, anger, and guilt’ (Bosworth, 2014). A 2016 report in the Sydney Morning Herald similarly described the psychological harm that detention centre workers on Manus Island and Nauru experience (Hashman, 2016).
While the ways in which detention centre work impacts professionals are therefore beginning to receive academic and public attention, the effects of detention visitations on volunteers have gone largely unstudied. One notable exception is a study by Surawski and colleagues (2008), which documented the high levels of stress and trauma that asylum seeker activists experience in their work. How these outcomes relate to the experience of visiting detention, however, was not addressed within the research design. Indeed, no known studies have considered the question of how the institutional contexts in which detention centre volunteers work shape their emotional experiences.
Insights from prison studies
Within the academic literature regarding immigration detention facilities, it is not uncommon for scholars to describe detention facilities as ‘prison-like’, or to call for these centres to be recognised as ‘immigration prisons’ (Moran et al., 2013). As Peterie notes: In many countries, including Australia, the immigration detention system borrows heavily from the prison system. Most obviously, these facilities are often run by the same private contractors, and have comparable architectural and surveillance features. (2018: 13)
Despite these similarities, it has been rare for scholars to move beyond broad comparisons by analysing immigration detention practices through the lens of prisons theory (Peterie, 2018). Such a framework is valuable, however, because it highlights the role of micro-controls in producing inmate and visitor distress through the (seemingly benign) practices of institutional life. Such practices have received minimal attention in studies of immigration detention facilities.
When it comes to understanding the affective aspects of carceral institutions and, in particular, the influence of micro-controls on detainee wellbeing, the work of Sykes is instructive (Peterie, 2018; Sykes, 2007 [1958]). The prison inmate, Sykes observed, is subject to ‘a vast body of rules and commands which are designed to control his behaviour in minute detail’ (2007 [1958]: 73). It is, he argued, the very triviality of these controls that makes them trying. Prison rules and regulations often appear arbitrary, and the frustration that is caused by this incomprehensibility is compounded by the unwillingness, on the part of the prison guards and authorities, to explain or justify their decisions. For Sykes, micro-controls function to ‘reduce the prisoners to the weak, helpless, dependent status of childhood’ (2007 [1958]: 75). They inflict pain by disempowering and infantilising inmates (see also Goffman, 1961).
Documenting the experiences of prison visitors, Comfort (2003) builds on Sykes’ work in a way that is highly illuminating for this study. Comfort conducted fieldwork at California’s San Quentin State Prison in 2000, where she observed prison visitations. Inmates’ kin and kith, she found, are subjected to: a weakened but still compelling version of the elaborate regulations, concentrated surveillance, and corporeal confinement governing the lives of ensnared felons […] myriad aspects of visitor processing – from the display of pertinent information to the commencement of visiting hours to the implementation of the dress code – are perpetually irregular and subject to change without notice. Although a moderate retard or glitch in the line of communication from the authorities to the visitors would be a natural feature of a large bureaucracy … in the case at hand one suspects that disorientation ‘is deliberately fostered by the prison officials in that explanations are often withheld as a matter of calculated policy’ (Sykes 1958). (Comfort, 2003: 101)
As the prison system deprived them of – among other things – ‘goods and services’ and ‘autonomy’, the visitors in Comfort’s study experienced the pains of imprisonment. While they retained their (technical) status as free citizens, the visitors became – for the period of their visitations – ‘quasi-inmates, people at once legally free and palpably bound’ (Comfort, 2003: 103).
A number of studies have highlighted the emotional, social and economic costs associated with visiting prisons (Christian, 2005; Christian et al., 2006). They have also drawn attention to the obstacles that kin and kith must overcome to undertake these visits. Prison visitors, scholars note, must ‘travel, endure a financial burden, devote the needed time and energy, bring children to visit, and subject themselves to an expected amount of scrutiny to participate in a visitation program’ (Tewksbury and DeMichele, 2005). What is notable about Comfort’s research, however, is that rather than understanding these obstacles and their effects as ‘collateral consequences of incarceration’ (Christian, 2005), she posits that these frustrations and deprivations may be deliberate. In raising questions of intentionality, Comfort’s work continues its dialogues with Sykes’ research. The frustrations and deprivations that Sykes described in The Society of Captives were – to at least some extent – intended aspects of the punishment that prisoners endured (Sykes, 2007 [1958]: 74, 81, 130); for Comfort, the frustrations and deprivations that prison visitors are subject to are also elements of institutional design.
This article is not alone in applying Sykes’ insights to institutions that are not civilian prisons. Indeed, Goffman cited Sykes in Asylums, arguing that prison technologies are observable in a range of institutions, including mental asylums.
A total institution may be defined as a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life. (Goffman, 1961: 11)
Goffman’s key insight – namely, that ‘what is prison-like about prisons is found in institutions whose members have broken no laws’ (1961: 11) – is highly instructive for this article. It demonstrates that even purportedly altruistic institutions can coerce and ‘break’ their inmates, using carceral practices that may appear innocuous to the casual observer.
Research design
Severe limits on access to immigration detention facilities (Fleay, 2015) mean that few researchers have been able to examine the causal mechanisms through which they inflict harm. Barriers to accessing detention facilities as a researcher are not limited to logistical constraints. Ethical considerations are also relevant, particularly given the extreme vulnerability of many detainees in terms of both their mental wellbeing and their precarious legal standing. Furthermore, research involving imprisoned populations is notoriously thorny due to the difficulties associated with securing informed consent in coercive institutional environments (Zion et al., 2010: 51). These difficulties have led to the production of a range of international guidelines concerning if and how research with prisoners should be conducted, including guidelines from the World Health Organisation, the United Nations, and the Council for International Organisations of Medical Sciences (Elger, 2008). All of these documents recommend that prison research should be conducted with extreme caution, and in many jurisdictions research of this kind can only be pursued if it will deliver clear and direct benefits to the prisoners themselves (Zion et al., 2010: 51).
Some immigration detention scholars have responded to these concerns by conducting research with ex-detainees. While this approach avoids the issue of securing consent from people in coercive prison environments, it is not without ethical complexity. Some individuals continue to experience the negative impacts of their detention even years after release (Coffey et al., 2010; Steel et al., 2006). Furthermore, asylum seekers who have been released from closed detention in Australia often continue to live in precarious and emotionally distressing situations within the community while their refugee claims are assessed (McAdam and Chong, 2014: 110–11). Even individuals who have already been granted refugee status often find themselves struggling as a consequence of Australia’s decision to deny maritime arrivals access to permanent protection, instead offering eligible refugees three-year Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) or five-year Safe Haven Enterprise Visa (SHEVs) (Andrew and Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, 2017; see also AHRC, 2013). The very issues that make it imperative for scholars to conduct studies into conditions within Australia’s immigration detention facilities thus also present significant ethical issues for researchers in this area (Zion et al., 2010: 50).
In light of these concerns, Zion and colleagues have recommended an alternative approach to researching conditions within closed detention facilities. Rather than speaking directly to past or present detainees and potentially subjecting them to further stress, they suggest that researchers consider using the testimonies of first-hand witnesses to inform their studies.
Evidence garnered from health professionals and refugee advocates in a variety of forms might resolve some ethical problems that are raised by the paradigms used in scientific or even conventional social scientific study. Such methodologies ensure that information that is gathered does not exploit or further endanger highly vulnerable people. (Zion et al., 2010: 54)
Given the ethical and logistical concerns associated with doing research in detention centres, and in light of the relatively small amount of scholarship regarding the specific (micro) mechanisms through which immigration detention centres harm asylum seekers, it is therefore appropriate that this study reflects upon what volunteer testimonies elucidate about how detention centre technologies impact detainees, as well as how they affect volunteers themselves.
This article is therefore based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 33 volunteers who support asylum seekers in Australia’s onshore immigration detention network. Interviews took between 45 and 90 minutes, and were conducted face-to-face in the interviewees’ local areas. The majority of interviewees had been volunteering for 12 months or longer. Most visited their detained ‘friends’ at least one a month, and on each occasion stayed for as long as the specific detention centre permitted (usually several hours).
Interviewees were recruited through the groups and organisations with which they volunteered. These groups and organisations were deliberately selected to reflect the diversity of the refugee and asylum seeker support movement in Australia (Gosden, 2012: 347–8). Participants in this study described their experiences visiting detainees in Villawood Immigration Detention Centre (‘Villawood’); Yongah Hill Immigration Detention Centre (‘Yongah Hill’); Maribyrnong Immigration Detention Centre (‘Maribyrnong’); Perth Immigration Detention Centre (‘Perth’); Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation (‘BITA’); Wickham Point Alternative Place of Detention (‘Wickham Point’); and/or North West Point Immigration Detention Centre (‘Christmas Island’). Given this wide coverage, this article draws conclusions regarding primary and secondary ‘prisonisation’ not at individual Australian detention facilities, but in Australia’s onshore immigration detention network more broadly.
Findings
Security and entrance procedures
The process of gaining entrance to a detention facility, the interviewees explained, was complex. First, visitors had to submit documentation to the centre, expressing their intention to visit one or more detainees during the designated visiting hours on a particular date. While this documentation was available on the immigration website, visitors could not complete the forms without the names of the detainees they wished to visit. As such, most volunteers began visiting through a friend who already visited, or through a pre-existing asylum seeker support group. Upon arriving at the facility, volunteers were required to go through several layers of security. Entrance procedures included steps such as signing in; confirming that their visitation request paperwork had been received and accepted; leaving personal belongings such as keys, wallets, phones and cameras in a locker; walking through screening machines similar to those at airport security gates; undergoing ‘trace detection’ for illicit substances; having gifts (including any food that they had brought to share with the asylum seekers) examined and at times rejected; donning a piece of identifying apparel (for example, a wrist band or fluorescent vest) to distinguish themselves from the detainees; and being ‘buzzed’ through numerous security doors before finally entering the visitation area.
Interviewees frequently used the language of a ‘prison’ or ‘gaol’ to describe the security apparatus at the centres, and volunteers who had experience working in the penal system typically agreed with these assessments. While visitors who had past experiences in corrective settings were less intimidated by the security apparatus itself – a General Practitioner who had done health work in prisons, for instance, said that the security was ‘what she expected’ – many were distressed to see prison technologies utilised in the detention of people who had not committed a crime. As one volunteer noted, ‘I had a very varied sort of a job in Corrective Services. So when I went to Villawood I thought “shit, this is like another bleeding gaol!”’
Interviewees who did not have backgrounds in correctional settings frequently emphasised the intimidating nature of the security procedures and carceral spaces, and reported feeling afraid when they first visited the centres. This apprehension, several emphasised, was a response not to the asylum seekers, but to the highly securitised environment that they were entering. The physical realities of the facilities – the high walls, layers of security doors, uniformed guards, sterile visiting rooms and constant surveillance – created an atmosphere of threat.
Volunteers from different centres emphasised different aspects of the entry procedure in their descriptions of the facilities. Several visitors to BITA talked in detail about the experience of arriving at ‘the final glass door’ – the last layer of security that separated the visitors from the detained asylum seekers. Approaching the door, they saw asylum seeker children 2 pressing their faces against the glass, eager to see who was visiting them. As one interviewee explained, ‘[t]he one thing that always gets me is the kids coming to the door. That glass door. That just makes me so sad […] But I guess that’s why I’m doing it’. For visitors to BITA, ‘that glass door’ provided a vivid reminder of one of the core realities of immigration detention: these gaol-like facilities imprisoned not hardened criminals but innocent men, women and children.
Volunteer visitors to Villawood, on the other hand, focused on the difficulties associated with gaining entry to the facility itself. They described the gradual escalation of screening procedures, such that what was once a relatively simple process – ‘[i]t used to be that you could turn up with the forms and go in’ – had become increasingly complex and bureaucratised.
I didn’t have any sense that we were unwelcome, but after a while they just made us follow more and more rules […] An obvious one was that you had to submit a list of names that you were going to visit 24 hours before, so you couldn’t just front up. I gather the idea was that they were going to do security checks on us. And I just said ‘look, we’re coming every week – you don’t have to do a security check every week. Why don’t we go on a list of already cleared people?’ And I said that to one of the women on the desk and she said ‘what a good idea, I’ll suggest that’, but you know it’s going nowhere. They’re not going to change the rule. (Interviewee)
These procedures precluded the possibility of spontaneous visits, and made it significantly harder for volunteers to gain entrance to the facilities. Volunteers also expressed frustration regarding Villawood’s unreliable drug detection machine, which at times delivered false positive results, thus forcing volunteers (some of whom had driven several hours to visit the centre) to abandon their visits.
The charge that the procedures governing admission to detention facilities were capricious and bureaucratic recurred in stories from across the detention network. Constantly shifting rules regarding the admission of food were particularly concerning for some interviewees, as the provision of food was one of the few immediate ways in which many interviewees felt they could assist the detainees. In the past, visitors had been permitted to bring a variety of goods – including the fresh fruit and homemade meals that the asylum seekers often requested – into the facilities to share with their friends. These items had helped to create an atmosphere of warmth and normality as the visitors and asylum seekers had shared meals together, and had also provided the asylum seekers with choice and a nutritious supplement to the food that the centres provided. As time progressed, however, most centres had moved to allow the admission of small quantities of factory-sealed produce only; many also prohibited detainees from keeping left-over food from their visits, although these rules were enforced erratically.
A comparable pattern was observable in visitor stories of trying to bring other practical items into the facilities. While visitors rarely encountered difficulties taking in ‘all sorts of lollies and choccies’, basic necessities such as toiletries and sanitary products were not permitted. As a visitor to Maribyrnong noted: When I went there I took two toothbrushes for him, toothpaste, a bag to put everything in, soap, soap dishes, deodorant, and a book that he wanted […] I was allowed to leave the bag to put things in, but I wasn’t allowed to leave the toothpaste, the toothbrushes, the deodorant or the soap. Because ‘we provide all of those things’. But I said […] ‘I’m told by the refugees they think the toothpaste is horrible and the toothbrushes are hard and you shouldn’t have hard toothbrushes.’ [They said:] ‘No. It’s against the rules.’ (Interviewee)
In banning these products, the facilities denied the asylum seekers both physical comfort and control. They ensured that even the small details of the asylum seekers’ lives were dictated by the institution, and thus enforced a humiliating deprivation of autonomy (Sykes, 2007 [1958]: 73). They also denied the volunteers a small but significant opportunity to demonstrate their care and ease their friends’ suffering, beginning a longer process of gradual disempowerment which continued through the duration of their visits.
Micro-level controls
When they visited immigration detention facilities, the volunteers in this study came face-to-face with the anguish that Australia’s detention policies produced. The stories that the interviewees shared regarding these encounters took a number of forms. Several participants described instances of asylum seekers ‘losing it’, ‘breaking down’ or ‘flipping out’. One interviewee, for instance, recalled seeing a woman ‘banging at the doors to get out and screaming and yelling and throwing things; the guards had to carry her outside kicking and screaming’. This incident, the interviewee noted, had been prompted by the asylum seeker’s food being removed from the common-area fridge: ‘[i]t was probably the last straw and she was obviously not well’, she said. Another interviewee described an asylum seeker child who ‘couldn’t stop crying’ when she was prevented from leaving the detention centre with her father (who had come to Australia earlier and was residing in the community).
More common than these stories of confrontation and outburst, however, were stories of quieter deteriorations. A large body of literature documents the relationship between time spent in detention and mental illness (Coffey et al., 2010; Steel et al., 2006). Participants in this study provided anecdotal evidence of this correlation, with numerous interviewees suggesting that their detainee friends had become increasingly withdrawn as they spent months and even years within the confines of the facilities. One detainee, who had studied law in Afghanistan, had been in detention for six months when he told a visitor that he felt so flat that he was unable to even read a book. ‘It just feels like, “what’s the point?”’, he had explained.
Within the detention facilities, both the asylum seekers and their visitors were subject to a range of restrictions regarding their movements. At BITA, for instance, neither asylum seekers nor visitors were allowed into the small garden area in the facility’s outdoor space. One visitor recalled trying to take a young asylum seeker child into the garden to look at the flowers, only to be told by a guard that they were ‘not allowed in there’.
I suppose I just thought, why do we deprive people of something so basic as having your toes in the grass and bending down and picking a petunia and looking at the colours on it? And feeling, you know, touching stuff? Whereas back in[side the centre] all that they could touch were hard things – like the climbing frame and the slippery slide. […] I guess that was a real symbol. (Interviewee)
In addition to rules regarding the use of outdoor spaces, asylum seekers and visitors were restricted in their movements indoors. At Yongah Hill, for example, asylum seekers and visitors were prohibited from using the same rest rooms, with asylum seekers required to return to the closed areas of the centres rather than using the visiting area facilities. This, one visitor explained, led to ‘ridiculous’ scenes as SERCO guards would ‘jump out from behind the [barrier] and [say] “no, you can’t go to the toilet!”’ As Sykes noted with respect to civilian prisons, the detainees in these facilities were reduced to the status of children (2007 [1958]: 75)
Detention facility guards also enforced rules regarding what activities asylum seekers and their visitors could pursue. Such regulations were often enforced in inconsistent and unpredictable ways, and it was frequently unclear where individual rules or requirements had originated. One interviewee, for example, visited a facility each week to play soccer with the detainee children. Depending on which guard was on duty, this activity might or might not be permitted. One day she arrived at the facility to find that a ‘no soccer’ sign had been erected. Another interviewee described visiting a centre to find adult Muslim asylum seekers colouring in what she described as ‘pre-school level’ pictures of Easter bunnies. One of the participating asylum seekers explained to the volunteer that she did not enjoy this activity, but cooperated in order to receive points to spend at the detention centre shop. In recounting this story, this interviewee emphasised the infantilising and ‘demeaning’ nature of this points-based system. Her testimony also demonstrated, however, that even institutionally favoured activities could be disrupted at any time. Shortly after that visit, she noted, colouring in had been banned. No notice or explanation was provided.
As had been the case with the prohibition against entering the detention centre garden, these rules and restrictions – and, indeed, the physical reminders of these rules within the detention spaces – took on symbolic meaning for asylum seekers and volunteers. This was particularly true for one volunteer who visited a facility each week to play pool with the teenaged detainees. One day she arrived to find that the pool balls had been confiscated – purportedly, these young asylum seekers told her, because other detainees had been using them in suicide attempts. What this interviewee emphasised was not the distress that these young people may have felt regarding such acts of self-harm (it seemed, she noted, that the children had become somewhat numb to such acts of desperation). Rather, she marvelled that centre management had not removed the pool table and cues. These objects had remained at the facility and become, for the asylum seekers that she visited, a potent symbol of their powerlessness and frustration.
Individually, these restrictions could be dismissed as bureaucratic rules or oversights. Alternatively, they could be framed as necessary measures to ensure the safety and security of the detainees, including by preventing suicides. What the interviewees suggested, however, was that these micro-controls served a markedly different function, not protecting the asylum seekers but gradually destroying their spirits. These hyper-governed spaces and their shifting schemes of permissions and prohibitions served as a constant reminder of who was in control. They underlined the fact that the asylum seekers – and indeed the volunteers who supported them – were subject to a greater authority; an authority, significantly, that appeared uninterested in the human costs of its decisions.
This sense of powerlessness, and the perception of a non-benevolent authority, was acutely distressing to the asylum seekers, not least because of the high stakes that surrounded their detention and refugee claims. Interviewees described their friends’ fear that they would be returned to situations of persecution and danger, and in some cases shared stories of previous detainees who they believed had been killed after their removal from Australia. The reality of the detainees’ powerlessness – constantly communicated at the symbolic level of micro-controls and physical and material frustration – therefore spoke to a larger sense of powerlessness regarding their futures and safety. As Neil and Peterienote, ‘[i]f a person cannot exercise choice in inconsequential matters, then a fortiori they lack agency with respect to their asylum claim’ (2018: 139). As they endeavoured to assist their friends, the volunteers also experienced a deep sense of helplessness, and voiced concern that their friends would either commit suicide or choose to return home to ‘a quick death’. As one interviewee explained, ‘if one of the guys was to turn around one day and say “I give up my application for refugee status, send me home”, the government would just send them home.’
Volunteer distress
Despite their clear structural privilege within their detention centre relationships, participants in this study consistently identified powerlessness as a defining aspect of their volunteering experience. One interviewee, a youth worker, explained that youth work usually involved working with young people to build hopes and dreams. Within detention environments, however, any aspirations were purely hypothetical. The young people that this volunteer visited were unable to build, commit to or sustain any real goals because their futures were so uncertain. In describing these dynamics, this volunteer underlined the psychological cruelty of the ‘indefinite’ nature of Australia’s detention regime. Unlike prisoners serving fixed sentences in civilian prisons, the asylum seekers in Australia’s detention network were unable to make any plans for their futures. As such, even the most basic strategies through which she usually helped clients to maintain hope (for example, by setting goals) were unavailable.
Another interviewee had a long history of doing health work with marginalised and disadvantaged people. While she was accustomed to witnessing suffering and trauma, she noted that this was the first time she had experienced what she described as ‘secondary trauma’. This interviewee emphasised that in her past work she had always had specific and practical tasks to perform, but that the immigration detention system prevented her from rendering meaningful assistance to the people she cared for. One of the asylum seekers that she visited, suffered from severe depression and was regularly placed on suicide watch. As a doctor, she could see the factors that contributed to this condition, but as a volunteer she had no power to intervene in her friend’s situation; she could not provide what her friend ultimately needed – safety and freedom outside of the traumatising detention system.
The participants in this study assisted their asylum seeker friends in a range of practical ways, often expending considerable time, energy and finances to do so. When permitted, volunteers provided the detainees that they visited with food, clothing, telephone cards, blankets, toys, books and other requested items; with the asylum seekers’ consent, they released their stories to the media and shared their letters at lectures and rallies; they connected asylum seekers with pro-bono legal support and assisted them to complete forms, to secure their departmental files and to otherwise progress their refugee claims; they wrote to politicians and prepared submissions for government enquiries; and they offered a listening ear and regular external contact. Notwithstanding these efforts, the participants in this study overwhelmingly experienced their actions as futile. When they did experience successes in their work (whether these were as small as being permitted to play a game of soccer, or as large as helping a detainee to prove their refugee status), these achievements were often more modest than they would have liked. In many cases, these positive outcomes also seemed random. The powerlessness that the volunteers felt during their visits thus endured despite, and at times because of, their (unpredictable) successes.
This experience of powerlessness in the face of preventable human suffering was a source of distress for many interviewees. In some cases, the pain and sense of futility that their volunteering produced permeated other areas of their lives, robbing previously pleasurable activities of meaning and importance. It was common for interviewees to report symptoms including intrusive thoughts, tearfulness, heightened emotionality, emotional ‘flatness’, sleeping difficulties and other physical and emotional symptoms of distress; numerous interviewees cried during their interviews. Volunteer attrition was a significant sub-theme in the dataset, with many interviewees describing their own or other volunteers’ decisions to (permanently or temporarily) cease their volunteering because the emotional strain was too great.
Research demonstrates that detention centre visitors play an important role in immigration detention facilities, breaking the centres’ isolation and providing emotional, informational and material support (Coffey et al., 2010; RCOA, 2017). There is also evidence that ‘social attachments matter’ (Leerkes et al., 2016: 8), in that asylum seekers who have networks in their host countries are less likely to accept coercive voluntary repatriations. When volunteers become so distressed that they are unable to continue their visits, asylum seekers are thus also harmed.
‘Deterrence’
Within the (largely psychological) literature regarding the effects of detention on asylum seekers, ‘trauma’ is a key analytical lens. The embryonic body of work concerning the experiences of those who work with detained asylum seekers also utilises this language of traumatisation. The idea that working with traumatised people can have emotional and psychological costs is not new, as the multiple terms that have been coined to describe these effects (‘secondary trauma’, ‘vicarious trauma’ and ‘compassion fatigue’, among others) attest. What these terms have in common is the premise that individuals can be significantly harmed by ‘indirect’ exposure to trauma. The concepts are generally illustrated with examples of care professionals hearing about past traumatic events in (for example) counselling sessions (Dass-Brailsford and Thomley, 2012); the affected professionals are separated – both physically and temporally – from the traumatic incidents themselves.
The interviewees in this study were not separated from – but were physically and temporally proximate to – the suffering that they encountered. They visited within, contributed to and were affected by the very environments that affected the asylum seekers they supported. As such, ideas regarding emotional contagion and secondary exposure to traumatic incidents are inadequate to explain their distress. What these testimonies highlight is the role of institutional practices in producing anguish and despair.
This article has filled a gap in the scholarship by providing a snapshot of institutional life in Australia’s onshore immigration detention facilities, as witnessed and experienced by volunteer visitors to these spaces. Australia’s detention facilities, it has argued, employ micro-controls to produce despair. Furthermore, the article has shown that the controls in question can be observed across Australia’s onshore detention network. Frustrations and deprivations such as those described above could be interpreted as accidents or oversights – or, alternatively, as the actions of ‘rogue’ or poorly trained guards. The arbitrary rules and capricious manoeuvres that this study has identified, however, have not been isolated incidents at individual detention facilities. Rather, they have been reported by volunteers in sites as geographically distant as Perth and Brisbane. What this article has described is a systemic problem.
Scholars such as Sykes (2007 [1958]) and Comfort (2003) have conceptualised the frustrations and deprivations of civilian prisons not as accidental aspects of these carceral settings, but as calculated strategies to produce ‘pain’. To locate this research within this tradition is to posit comparable intent or, at a minimum, functionality with respect to Australia’s immigration detention system. A growing body of research documents government efforts to encourage ‘voluntary repatriations’ (a form of specific deterrence) (Gerver, 2017; Webber, 2011) through policies and practices that pressure asylum seekers to return ‘home’. Such strategies often involve cynical attempts to make life in the host country untenable, while providing incentives to those who accept repatriation.
This article has shown how Australia’s onshore immigration detention facilities produce isolation and despair through the micro-practices of institutional life, and thus conceivably contribute to this deterrence objective. Powerlessness and anguish, it has shown, are institutionalised features of Australia’s onshore immigration detention network. The frustrations and deprivations of life in Australia’s immigration detention centres are corrosive to hope, and corrosive to networks of social support.
Conclusion
Since its introduction in 1992, Australia’s mandatory detention policy has been subject to resounding criticism on numerous grounds. The policy of mandatory detention has been condemned as a breach of Australia’s human rights obligations. Australia’s policies of detaining all unlawful non-citizens without the right to challenge their detention has been described as a breach of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, both of which prohibit arbitrary detention (AHRC, 2017: 12). The fact that this policy disproportionately affects maritime asylum seekers has also been seen as a breach of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which prohibits governments from discriminating against asylum seekers based on their means of arrival (Spinks and McCluskey, 2013). In addition, Australia’s policy of detaining children has been condemned as a breach of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (AHRC, 2014).
At the same time, Australia’s detention facilities have been charged with producing depression, anxiety and PTSD in asylum seekers (Steel et al., 2006); driving detainees to self-harm and suicide (Mares and Jureidini, 2004; Procter et al., 2013); causing physical illness and impairment (Hadgkiss et al., 2012: 36); and affecting physical, psychological and developmental problems in children (AHRC, 2014; Mares and Jureidini, 2004). Reports of mental health concerns among detention centre workers are also starting to emerge (Bosworth, 2014; Hashman, 2016; Puthoopparambil et al., 2015).
This article has added to the growing body of evidence concerning the negative effects of Australia’s detention system by documenting the experiences of detention centre visitors. It has highlighted some of the mechanisms through which detention facilities harm asylum seekers, and shown that these technologies extend to negatively impact centre volunteers. Most notably, this article has demonstrate that, within this system, even seemingly benign bureaucratic mechanisms can function to inflict harm, thus serving broader ‘deterrence’ objectives. As long as detention centres are beholden to the logic of ‘deterrence’, efforts to make these facilities more ‘humane’ will therefore not be enough. This article thus adds to the chorus of voices condemning Australia’s asylum seeker policies and calling for an end to indefinite mandatory detention.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr Susan Banki, Prof Stephen Castles and Dr David Neil for their guidance and support during this research project.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by an Australian Research Training Program Stipend Scholarship (RTP) and a travel grant from the University of Sydney. The author gratefully acknowledges this assistance.
