Book Review: Visiting Immigration Detention: care and cruelty in Australia’s asylum seeker prisons – Michelle Peterie

Michelle Peterie, Bristol University Press, 2022, 176 pages

With the UK and others competing to become the least attractive destination for refugees and asylum seekers who arrive by sea, the Australian approach of indefinite mandatory detention, offshore processing, and third country resettlement has been praised. But for those detained by the Australian government in its onshore centres – largely plane arrivals – harsh treatment and harm is also present. The University of Sydney’s Dr Peterie explores this through the experiences of the volunteer visitors who befriended and supported them. Her book, in the Global Migration and Social Change series, draws on the perspectives of 70 visitors between 2015 and 2020. Its aim is to document the onshore harm, and argue that the cruelty against the detainees – and also their supporters – is neither accidental or unintentional. ‘Reform’ is not a prospect because control via cruelty is the whole point. While official proponents defend this as either the deterrence of dangerous boat journeys, potential terrorism or people smuggling (according to how the public feels at the time), leaked operational documents from offshore detention show that making life oppressive to the point of mental disintegration has a control function even after the refugees have arrived. If the existing detainees ‘voluntarily’ return to harm, it gives a plausible defence for fudging Australia’s compliance with the refugee treaty’s prohibition of refoulement.

The author investigates the tricky context of volunteer support, discussing its personal and political dynamics. Is it best seen as emotionally gratifying charity by saviours to pitiful victims, a comfortable substitute for political action for change, and merely taking the rough extremities off an oppressive and violent system, all adding up to cooperation with an unjust system? For many, the original motivation for their goodness was simple and visceral: to just be there and offer to help. In practice, being directly and immediately exposed to suffering was transformative for many visitors, giving greater moral certainty about their cause, and an altered insight into how the world really works. Officialdom seemingly tolerated mental illness and solitary confinement without careful consideration, effectively endorsing the backward sections of society who deny refugees’ human worth. The author found that the increased constraints applied to them at the sites of interaction – inside the quasi-prisons – made the visitors temporary prisoners themselves: inside the facilities, subject to its inflexible rules, and increasingly unwelcomed by authorities.

Yet it was initially jarring on site to some visitors to find their detained friend distributing food and drink, in effect rejecting the paternalistic relationship of a giver supporting a taker and claiming agency as a host and an equal. This creates an implicitly subversive relationship of ‘reflexive solidarity’ rather than charity; many detainees of course were political or human rights activists in their own country. Many visitors came to see being ‘a friend to the stranger’ as a political act, and pushback, through their advocacy and bearing public witness, as political resistance. Public solidarity, influencing their own communities and conveying to politicians that detention was not as electorally popular as thought, and that detainees should not be treated as criminals, were actions reinforced by visible support from a growing body of Australians, including health professionals and public figures. Yet support to individual asylum seekers has been seen as more stressful compared to care provided to other disadvantaged groups, and apparently has fallen away during the Operation Sovereign Borders period (from 2013). Witnessing suffering without being able to stop it was challenging, especially when trying to project positivity, with significant emotional post-visit distress to the visitors, including shame, complicity, powerlessness, and depression.

Exposing these collateral effects on visitors is not the author’s main purpose: the malevolence of the incarceration setup is central, with one study showing the rate of onshore internee self-harm as 214 times more frequent than self-harm admissions into the Australian hospital system. Peterie highlights the forced relocation of detainees, which she says is not much studied compared to involuntary confinement, with their few material possessions often lost in relocation, and consequently their personal identity and attachment. Self-evidently demeaning are unchallengeable acts of power, which harm both detainees and supporters, producing isolation and despair from the personal distress of transfer to remote locations without legal access, and the rupture of relationships by “abrupt and painful attacks on those connections that already exist.” In the five years of her study, she only heard of one instance when visitors were permitted to properly farewell a friend. By 2018, the reduction in boat arrivals, and public pressure to release families and children in detention meant that many onshore centres were closed, including the very violent Maribyrnong IDC (Immigration Detention Centre); medical evacuations, requiring onshore transfer from Nauru and PNG, have reversed this somewhat.

The propagation of a false security narrative to frighten the public is politically designed, and is internalised by security guards in a militant and militarised culture, with the abandonment of any previous ‘community liaison’ ethic, and the casual assignment of criminal treatment to non-criminals. The deprivation of certainty through indefinite detention is debilitating, as detainees often tell us, because randomness and lack of explanation for decisions implies those under control have no right to know. Peterie amplifies these arguments, theoretically and from visitor and investigative reports on forced relocation, hard-edged authority, bureaucratic violence, mental ill-health, and serial mental disintegration. The privatisation of IDCs, now run by prison management companies, means that modern techniques of precise psychological pain are dominant, including deprivation of autonomy and the choice of goods and services, implicit reprisals for non-cooperation, the loss of intimate relationships, and increased security. Domestic detention is ostensibly regulated by the domestic legal system, unlike the offshore centres, and this promotes convergence with the ways of the domestic prison system. The banality of ‘operationally necessary’ policy, its ‘plausible denial’ of exceptional treatment, obscures the violence and belittlement done to victims, despite their lack of criminality.

Kevin Bain’s refugee reading guide is at Bayside Refugee Support. It has short summaries of about 100 books published over the last 20 years