Desert Storm - the intimate space of power

The Intimate Space of Power

Nigel Hoffmann

In 1999, Australia began a rapid expansion of its immigration detention system to process asylum seekers who arrived on Australia's northern borders, usually on Ashmore Reef and Christmas Island, and largely originating from the Middle East. The largest of the detention centres was built at Woomera in South Australia in October 1999, and in the first year of its operation there were riots, fires, a mass escape, many suicide attempts and allegations of sexual abuse within the centre. During February 2001, a mass hunger strike of over 300 people went on for up to 30 days, many with their lips sewn, teenagers were attempting to hang themselves, and there were few terms to describe the despair in the compound. Crucially though, none of these protests have prompted any major changes in the detention policies of the Australian government, and now have set the standard high for what is shocking, deplorable or outrageous. What else must the detainees do to bring meaningful attention to their plight?

Much of the effect of detention has been documented in the mainstream media in the past year, with many journalists concluding that detention is detrimental to the mental health of asylum seekers. The extraordinary rates of self-harm by detainees are taken to indicate this: there were 264 incidents of self-harm in the year from October 2000 to October 2001 in Australian detention centres (2002 DIMIA FOI request). But then, the outbursts of protest and the methods of protest employed are also used to dehumanise and alienate the detainees. Lip-sewing in particular seems to conjure up associations with authoritarian fathers, burqas and female circumcision, and these fears have been fed by media coverage of the hunger strikes. I am not planning to undertake a review of the media coverage of detention, I am looking at how the power of the detention processing works on the personal level, and how difference is accentuated in even the intimate spaces of detainee lives, using Goffman's labelling theory. Goffman is appropriate because of the observations I made of staff behaviour in terms of their perceptions and labels of the detainees, and how they reinforced these perceptions and found confirmation of them. The detainees were labelled in terms of their morality, and as Goffman notes "the stigmatisation of those with a bad moral record clearly can function as a means of social control" (Goffman 165:1963).

The empirical work for this study was conducted during the period from April to September 2000, when I was employed as an Activity Officer at the Woomera Detention Centre. I kept notes from my observations in a diary during the six months I worked at Woomera, and some of this study has come from these notes, and from others I have written since I left my position. I am now aiming to use these recollections of circumstances that I witnessed to develop the ongoing debate about detention of asylum seekers. Discussion seems to be stuck on opposition to 'mandatory' detention, and supporters of the current system, and thus the issue of humane treatment of asylum seekers is subverted while debates continue about the 'mandatory' nature of detention. In fact, the government is much happier to show the need for detaining asylum seekers for some time than it is to answer to questions about the standard of humane care and protection Australia offers to those in need, especially those from radically different cultures. The reports coming out of the detention centres in the outback are sounding like stories from somewhere else, 'other' people who can't fit into Australia. The isolation of the centres is working perfectly well to marginalise the detainees for the government.

Goffman's study of mental asylums and other total institutions identified various models, and the pun on 'asylum seekers' would be funny if they had not found themselves within such an austere institution. Within Goffman's descriptions, I find that Woomera comes under the "type of institution is organized to protect the community against what are felt to be intentional dangers to it, with the welfare of the persons thus sequestered not the immediate issue: jails, penitentiaries, POW camps and concentration camps" (Goffman 5:1961). Woomera has been too easily compared to a concentration camp since back in 2000, and I feel that this has undermined any reasonable analysis of the system of detention, so I do not join this analysis lightly, but consider that the comparison with other total institutions is appropriate in terms of Goffman's work. I also found it appropriate to use Goffman's forms of labelling theory as developed in 'Stigma'. Goffman stated, "we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human ... we construct a stigma theory, an ideology to explain his inferiority and account for the danger he represents" (Goffman 15:1963). It is this process of labelling as 'other' that is used in a crucial dimension in immigration detention, and that allows the system of detention to legitimate itself.

Hage described the state of people in immigration detention in terms of an 'ethnic cage', as outsiders who are detained until their status can be determined. The point he is making is that people who are labelled un-Australian, or non-citizens, are detained in a manner that seems un-Australian. Hage argues that the policy of 'ethnic caging' is a negation of the direction Australia has taken within multiculturalism, as an "ethic of goodwill towards ethnic otherness" (Hage 105:1998). So the detainees are labelled as 'other', in an uncomfortably similar process to the dehumanising of ethnic difference seen recently in Eastern European nationalism. As Hage notes "the concentration camp-like images it fosters make 'ethnic caging' appear closer to 'ethnic cleansing' than to anything remotely linked to multicultural appreciation and tolerance" (Hage 106:1998).

Observations:
Cross-cultural education was supposed to make the staff more professional and sensitive to the needs of the residents in the centre, but the way it was used was merely to de-humanise the 'un-Australian' detainees, and emphasise the strangeness of their Middle-Eastern culture. For example, much was made of the fact that 'they don't use toilet paper' and 'they climb up and squat on the toilets', without acknowledging that this is common for millions of people around the world. Officers would walk into detainee rooms without removing their shoes, and many other small things that were all noticed by an increasingly frustrated population. It would have taken very little to educate staff about simple courtesies such as respecting that the barracks were homes for these people, but cross-cultural misunderstandings were emphasised so that staff did not become over-friendly with any detainees. Overt racism was not prevalent, but subtle reinforcement of a distant difference ensured that relations with detainees were always premised on suspicion.

On one occasion, the Welfare Officer was off sick, and the shoes we had been waiting months for had finally arrived. Our translator, an Iraqi detainee named A____ had been delegated the responsibility of delivering the shoes to the families who needed them, and he had been running around the compound to take them to people, but then had decided to organise the people to come to him. A____ and the ladies who 'worked' for Welfare were collecting forms and ID cards off people, and getting the shoes out to people very efficiently when I walked past, and I laughed and congratulated them on their system. However, any detainees outside of the main compound were supposed to wear bright orange 'worker' vests at all times, and A____ and the ladies hadn't bothered to wear theirs. I walked through to my office area, and a huge ACM Team Leader came across and said to me "What's that fella think he's doing, sitting up there like he's king shit? Where's his orange shirt? I want you to go out there and carve him a new arsehole". I went and simply organised orange vests for A____ and the others, I was unable to really do anything else, and there was nobody in management who would have listened to a complaint about such language. Foucault would have said that the sexual dynamic of power is undeniable, and shows that it serves clearly to reinforce the dominant power relations, in this case, white Anglo-Saxon patriarchy. The wielding of such discipline "produces subjected and practised bodies, 'docile bodies'" (1975:138), and thus the detainees were more easily controlled as submissive to the demands of the detention regime.

On another occasion I witnessed a young Afghani boy who was friendly with an ACM officer whistle to him in a 'cat-call' to get his attention. The officer tried to explain to him that the 'cat-call' was how to whistle to girls, and that you don't whistle to men in Australia, but the boy just thought it was funny; the 'cat-call' whistle is a normal greeting in Afghani culture. There were around 50 unaccompanied minors; teenage boys mainly from Afghanistan who were all accommodated together in bunk beds in old army barrack buildings. Persian people particularly are very relaxed about male-male relations, and they express their friendship openly. Often they would lie in bed together or sit on their beds under blankets, playing cards and talking through the days and nights. The ACM officers would conduct a headcount after midnight, and sometimes the boys would be jumping back into individual beds. This was taken to indicate homosexuality, and then as a further indicator of the morality and respectability of the asylum seekers. The norms of the hetero-dominated ACM officers were used to construct a system that excluded and disapproved of any behaviour that was seen as un-Australian. Goffman's (1963) view of deviance and the stigmatisation of deviance from the norm give a deeper understanding of the relations involved in this scenario, which have been re-enacted many times since as ACM officers interpret other cultural behaviour in terms of their own norms. Effectively, the label of 'deviance' was used by the officers to assert their moral superiority. Unfortunately some of the 'whistle-blowers' who have spoken out about conditions in detention have focused on sexual abuse which they constructed as a 'norm' of Middle-eastern culture, even to the extent of fabricating that the Koran endorses such relations. This of course elicited a lot of media attention, and once again marginalised the difference of asylum seekers.

There was a family with three daughters in the centre who were rumoured to have engaged in prostitution. It was clear to me that the girls were popular and respected by the men in the camp, and perhaps were even able to use their sexuality in exchange for security or protection (an indicator of how little protection was available to the asylum seekers). There were some rumours that one of the girls performed sex acts for a Mars Bar, and the rumours of the Mars Bar girl spread fast among all the officers. The rumours were never verified, but they made it into the township of Woomera, and there were jokes at the supermarket if any Centre staff bought a Mars Bar. New officers arriving for a 6-week contract were given a tour that pointed out the 'brothel' in India Compound, and rumours became treated as established facts. As Agamben writes that 'the camp as dislocating localization is the hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living' (1999:175), it is clear that small-town rumour-mongering was used to alienate asylum seekers one step further, and once again they were rendered as threatening to our morality, trapped in the same old comparisons of Australian norms with 'other' ways of living.

After the meals, the detainees were required to walk through Gate 3, and get their number checked off the list at the desk. I was waiting nearby, and watched as an Iraqi man walked up and said to the officer "POK 83 brother", and the officer looked up at him and said, "Do I look like your fucking brother?" The Iraqi laughed nervously and walked through the gate, and the other officers were laughing too, but it is offensive to use expletives at all in Arabic, let alone in response to an obvious attempt to be friendly and 'brotherly'. These reactions were talked about throughout the camp, and certainly fuelled the dissent that was to overflow in months to come.

Every detainee had a number, which was allocated from the first three letters of the boat they arrived on e.g. LOC 128, POK 84, NIM 67. For all of 2000 while I worked there, it was considered acceptable to call people by their number, and if I asked someone for their name, they would often give me their number. The policy now is that people should be addressed by their name, but numbers are still invariably used to identify people. A PA system was installed in August 2000 with overhead speakers, in an attempt to improve communication, but the system was very unpopular with the population, for often the detainee's number would just be repeated over the loudspeakers until they made their appearance at the gate for their appointment. This was considered completely disrespectful, especially when there were officers just standing around who could walk across and speak to the individuals, and ask them to come for their appointment. Foucault states that 'in the perfect camp, all power would be exercised solely through exact observation, each gaze would form part of the overall functioning of power'. (1975:171).

Goffman pointed out that 'total institutions disrupt or defile precisely those actions that in civil society have the role of attesting to the actor and those in his presence that he has some command over his world - that he is a person with 'adult' self-determination, autonomy and freedom of action.' (1961:43). The residents at Woomera were deprived of adult responsibility for themselves and their families, restricted in every privilege from the telephone to the preparation of food, and rendered completely dependent on the immigration bureaucracy. Parents complained to me that they had nothing to give their children, that they had nothing to reinforce their family relations with, and often the children would go to an officer with requests for clothing, shoes or toys. Their parents had to queue up for meals and depend on ACM to provide for them, and had to wait in line for any requests, often receiving less attention than the children, and any previous status was erased.

Discussion:
As long as the debate on detention of refugees is situated in the semantics of 'mandatory' and the Left runs a fear campaign based on razor wire and children in detention, the government is able to justify its policy. I believe the very personal, intimate nature of the control exerted by detention staff reinforced difference and existing power relations at Woomera, in a manner that is still unaddressed. We are seeing European countries such as Greece and the UK beginning to detain large numbers of asylum seekers, and the Australian government is actively pushing Indonesia to implement a detention system, so I believe it is important to account for the intimate spaces that detention of asylum seekers works from, and the effect it will continue to have on detainees.

The anxiety of powerless patience and an uncertain future was a constant provocation for the detainee population, and many of the staff were certainly expecting more unrest than has actually occurred. The very design of separate compounds and enclosures of razor wire was planned with the expectation of violent riots, and the riot teams got what they were waiting for. The spectacle of violent uprisings in the camps works right into the government's deterrence policy, marginalizing the asylum seekers into all of the stereotypes that the Australian public fear the most. In successfully labelling them as 'other', the government has been able to deny their suffering, and still maintain official policy of multicultural tolerance of ethnic diversity with Australia.

The isolation and exclusion of the detainees in the 'ethnic cages' has been increased by the inability of social researchers (or journalists) to gain access to the detention centres. It is for this reason that I planned this paper as a discussion of the social relations that manifested in the institution, and the way that affected the detainees. The current debate about detention centres has been focused on the rights of the children, or the speed of the processing of asylum claims, which does not include recognition of people's freedom of movement, or discussion of the limited terms recognised for claiming asylum. From what I saw at Woomera, there were people who were going to have more trouble establishing a secure future for themselves after the traumatising events in the centre, whether settling in Australia or elsewhere. In all of the examples I have discussed, perceptions of deviance and difference were established, and then their actions were taken as confirmation of the label.

Just as Goffman saw that 'mental patients can find themselves crushed by the weight of a service ideal that eases life for the rest of us' (Goffman 386:1961), asylum seekers in detention are gradually worn down by the process of a system that is ostensibly acting to protect Australian society from 'outsiders'. Humiliation has caused the riots and unrest in Australian detention centres, and such events should be seen as a reaction to the inhumane processing, and not a reflection of the character of the people caught in Australia's policy shift to a 'hard line' on border protection.