Corrosive places, inhuman spaces: Mental health in Australian immigration detention

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Health & Place 14 (2008) 254–264 www.elsevier.com/locate/healthplace

Corrosive places, inhuman spaces: Mental health in Australian immigration detention Pauline McLoughlina,, Megan Warinb,1 a

Discipline of Gender, Work and Social Inquiry, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia b Department of Anthropology, Durham University, 43 Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP, UK

Received 21 November 2006; received in revised form 1 June 2007; accepted 19 June 2007

Abstract Since their establishment in 1992, Australian Immigration Detention Centres have been the focus of increasing concern due to allegations of their serious impact on the mental health of asylum seekers. Informed by Foucault’s treatise on surveillance and the phenomenological work of Casey, this paper extends the current clinical data by examining the architecture and location of detention centres, and the complex relationships between space, place and mental health. In spatialising these relationships, we argue that Immigration Detention Centres operate not only as Panopticons, but are embodied by asylum seekers as ‘anti-places’: as places that mediate and constitute thinned out and liminal experiences. In particular, it is the embodied effects of surveillance and suspended liminality that impact on mental health. An approach which locates the embodiment of place and space as central to the poor mental health of asylum seekers adds an important dimension to our understandings of (dis)placement and mental health in the lives of the exiled. r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Anti-place; Mental health; Asylum seekers; Embodiment; Surveillance; Suspended liminality

Introduction For more than a decade, the Immigration Detention Centre (or IDC) has sat at the heart of hard-line asylum seeker policy in Australia. Underlying its evolution are long-standing cultural anxieties surrounding so-called ‘boat people’, which resurfaced publicly in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Concerns about a feared ‘flood’ of asylum seekers Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 402 903 943.

E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. McLoughlin), [email protected] (M. Warin). 1 Tel.: +44 191 3346177. 1353-8292/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.healthplace.2007.06.008

from South-East Asia and China fuelled a strong political reaction from the Australian Government at the time (Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC), 2004, p. 141). This culminated in 1992 with the passing of mandatory detention legislation in an attempt to safeguard Australian sovereignty. Subsumed within Federal immigration law, this legislation requires that any ‘unauthorised arrival’ (i.e., any non-citizen lacking ‘valid documentation’ such as a visa or passport) who enters Australian territory or who is intercepted in the nation’s migration zone, will be held in an IDC until a decision can be made on their status (HREOC, 2001).

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The process of reviewing and determining claims can take anywhere between 2 and 7 years to resolve, and during this time asylum seekers and their children are held in detention. Immigration Detention Centres are typically located in isolated areas of Australia: on the fringes of capital cities; lost within semi-arid and desert regions, and (as is increasingly the case) on small Pacific islands (such as Christmas island) which are funded by the Federal Government to ‘process’ asylum seekers. In 2006, plans were announced to expand the offshore ‘processing’ of asylum seekers and illegal fishermen on a ‘floating prison’ under the Australian Federal Government’s Pacific Solution policy (cf. Rajaram, 2003). When held up to the asylum seeker policies of other industrialised countries, the severity of Australia’s approach remains unparalleled: in terms of the sheer length of detention, the blanket nature in which undocumented asylum seekers are detained, and the lack of independent review of the system (Silove, 2003). Evidence points to this approach as being directly responsible for the increasing incidence of mental illness and self-harm amongst asylum seekers, most particularly contributing to ongoing post-traumatic stress disorders, depression and associated disability (Steel et al., 2004, 2006).2 As well as concerns being raised by researchers and health professionals, the situation has not gone unnoticed by prominent lawyers and legal reform groups, political journalists such as Mares (2002), the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, Amnesty International and the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC, 2005). Despite the recent rush of reforms foreshadowing the tenuous release of many longterm detainees and children, and the establishment of residential housing arrangements for children and their mothers, the mandatory detention ethos of the policy remains firmly in place. Currently, the literature that examines the incidence and experience of mental health in IDCs takes a biomedical approach to studying health and illness, in which place is taken for granted as a backdrop or container for ill health. An example of how setting is understood can be seen in the position statement of Sainsbury, the former president of the Public Health Association of Australia (PHAA, 2 Silove and Steel (1998) for example, document the alarming incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and generalised anxiety disorders among Australian asylum seekers.

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2002), who characterised detention centres as ‘psychosocially destructive environments’ (PHAA, 2002). Sainsbury acknowledges the negative psychological effects of detention; of an environment which contains and traps people in a defined space. Similarly, Silove (a prominent Australian psychiatrist and critic of detention conditions) describes detention settings as unstable, insecure and hostile, and more likely to lead to long-term mental health problems than a setting which is supportive, secure and safe. The effect of immigration detention spaces is thus understood as eroding personal and social resources for coping, and exacerbating vulnerabilities and posttraumatic stress (Silove, 2003). The actual relationship or mechanisms by which the ‘environment’ and mental health interact is left unexamined. It is precisely this relationship between detention spaces/places and the poor mental health of detained asylum seekers that we seek to address in this paper. Health geographers (cf. Kearns, 1993; Kearns and Moon, 2002; Dyck, 2006) and anthropologists (cf. Low and Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003; Warin, 2000, 2005) have been critical of the unproblematic rendering of space and place and have argued that health cannot be separated from place; that is, from the meanings and experiences inscribed and evoked in spaces. In this sense, ‘placing’ the mental health of Australia’s detained asylum seekers not only involves looking at the detention centre as a purely geographic location, built setting or site for administrative processes (that is, a ‘space’), but more importantly extends to what the detention environment ‘means’ for those contained within it; how space is embodied and experienced, and the broader social consequences it may have. We are also called upon to understand how those ‘managing’ asylum seekers and those outside the detention space play a central role in shaping the mental health of detained asylum seekers: by forming an active part of the cultural and structural milieux. The paper is organised as follows. Firstly, we describe the location and architecture of Australian IDCs in the context of Foucault’s panopticon, and its direct links with surveillance, power and control. The panopticon, however, is limited as it does not account for the agency of bodies, nor the phenomenological orientation of bodies. Here, we use Casey’s work to extend the operation of Foucault’s disciplinary power. We argue that it is the panopticon design and location of detention centres that

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creates an ‘anti-place’, a term coined by Casey to describe the ‘thinned out’ and profoundly negative effects of modern (and institutional) space. Akin to Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, Casey’s conceptualisation of place positions the body as central, as a ‘geographical self’ that contests the dichotomies that hold the self apart from body and place (Casey, 2001, p. 684). In bringing together Foucault’s poststructuralist account of power with the phenomenologically orientated philosophy of Casey, we demonstrate points of convergence between the two approaches. Foucault provides us with the analytical tools by which to understand the architecture of confinement and Casey allows us to examine the subsequent bodily incorporation of such confinement. These two theoreticians compliment each other, for they examine the spaces occupied by the body, and the perception and experience of that space. It is, as Low and Lawrence-Zuniga (2003, p. 2) suggest, through the embodiment of space that an understanding of a person’s emotions and state of mind, sense of self, social relations and cultural predispositions can be understood. In the asylum seeker context, it is the embodiment of (and resistance to) disciplinary power through surveillance and liminality that we investigate. As one might expect, the range and availability of research evidence into the incidence of mental health in detainee populations is limited. As Steel et al. (2004) have noted in their study into the psychiatric status of asylum seeker families in remote Australian detention centres, there are restrictions of access to populations, the possibility of transcultural errors in diagnostic instruments, and difficulties in verifying verbal reports. Mares and Jureidini (2004, p. 520) also note how medical and allied health staff working in IDCs are subject to contracts that prohibit speaking publicly. Despite these restrictions, the evidence strongly suggests that there is a coherence of data across different research projects, and a convergence with clinical observations and reports of extensive inquiries undertaken by the Commonwealth government in detention centres. It is from this primary data, and Inquiry reports, that we make our case. Architectural discipline It is tempting, when writing about the spaces in which those seeking refuge are detained, to turn to

Fig. 1. The isolated, exclusionary locations of Australia’s Immigration Detention Centres (source: HREOC (2003). Section 1: Questions and answers about refugees and asylum seekers in Face the Facts (third ed.). Canberra: 18). *Note: Woomera, Cocos Island, Curtin, Port Hedland and Papua New Guinea (Manus Island) IDCs are no longer operating.

the political philosophy of Agamben. Gregory, for example, in his critique of the Bush administration’s ‘political theology’, argues that Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay is an ‘iconic example of that paradoxical space which Agamben describes as the ‘‘state of exception’’’ (Gregory, 2006, p. 405). This state of exception is peculiar to the cartography of Guantanamo Bay and its placement within legal geographies, for the prison is simultaneously outside the United States (where captives can be held indefinitely), and within the United States in order to permit ‘co-ercive interrogation’. Australian IDCs do not fall into this paradoxical position as they are (with the exception of the Pacific island nation of Nauru), both geographically and legally placed within Australian territories. Despite the dissimilarity of sovereign power and law in these cases, Agamben’s philosophy is useful in the Australian context for understanding the exceptional placement of IDCs in excluded and abandoned zones. As Fig. 1 demonstrates, detention centres are geographically placed at the margins of mainstream populations, located away from major towns and cities, either on the urban outskirts (as in the Villawood IDC) or more notoriously in remote coastal, desert or semi-arid regions (see for example, Fig. 1 and Plate 2). Some (as in the case of the Woomera IDC) have historically been sites of British government nuclear weapons testing, a US military base until the late 1990s, and have more

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Plate 1. Razor wire perimeter fences at Villawood IDC. Source: ChilOut (2007a) (http://www.chilout.org/gallery/centres.html# Maribyrnong).

recently been proposed sites for a low grade nuclear waste repository.3 These locations are, with little historical regard for their Indigenous inhabitants, identified as a ‘noman’s land’; marginal spaces where social ‘unmentionables’ and dangerous wastes are located and removed from mainstream society. Bauman goes as far to suggest that as ‘outsiders’, refugees become human waste, and are ‘sealed off in tightly closed containers’ (Bauman, 2004, p. 85). Reinforcing their ‘sealed off’ and marginalised placement, the architectures of mainland centres are fronted by highsecurity reinforced gates or entrances; surrounded by heavy fencing topped by razor wire (see for example Plate 1); divided into building ‘blocks’; controlled by security checkpoints, and dominated by the presence of privately contracted correctional management guards (as demonstrated in Plates 1 and 3). On Pacific islands, offshore detention centre conditions are more rudimentary, taking on the make-shift enclosed shanty aspects of a prison camp or developing world refugee camp, managed by the private contractors ‘International Organisation for Migration’ (IOM) (Manne, 2004). The high security design and geographic marginalisation of the detention space create a clear physical and socially symbolic division between the outside world and those who are held within. In an interview with the HREOC in the 1990s, this visceral sense of isolation was powerfully related by 3 For more information on the use of Woomera and Maralinga lands as sites for British nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s, see Eames and Collett (1985).

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Plate 2. Arid, isolated location of Baxter IDC in South Australia’s interior. Source: Chilout (2007b) (http://www.chilout. org/gallery/port_hedland.html).

Plate 3. Detention guards in riot uniform at Port Hedland IRPC. Source: Chilout (2007c) (http://www.chilout.org/gallery/port_ hedland.html).

one 16-year-old Cambodian boy who had been held at the Port Hedland IDC for 5 years: Port Hedland is a very isolated place. The detention centre is near the ocean and there are high fences all around the outside of the building, separating the centre from the rest of the world. (HREOC, 1998, p. 218) Access to detention centres is subject to stringent security checks, procedures and restrictions which are designed to regulate and control the visitor’s experience of detention and discourage outsiders from entering the detention space (Sultan and O’Sullivan, 2001; Phillips, 2000). No media are

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allowed into the centres without explicit approval and regulated visits, so representations of life in detention are tightly controlled by the governing agencies. Douglas offers us a way of theorising why asylum seekers might be inserted into this type of landscape and architecture. In her (Douglas, 1966) anthropological theory of purity and pollution, Douglas argues that people and objects that do not conform to or cross social boundaries and categories (such as eels and worms that inhabit water, though not as fish) are deemed anomalous, out of place, and often dirty and dangerous. Asylum seekers fall into this anomalous category as they are boundary crossers and are quintessentially ‘out of place’; and thus represented as marginalised and dangerous. Indeed, Douglas’ theory of matter out of place allows us to see why asylum seekers are discursively constructed as out of line ‘queue jumpers’ (when in fact there is often no queue to join in countries of origin) and alarmingly characterised (by popular discourses and Australian politicians) as ‘dangerous terrorists’ and a threat to the Australian body politic.4 Directly opposing this negative positioning of the ‘dangerous’ asylum seeker, the ‘genuine’ and official refugee as recognised under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (the Convention), and subsumed in Australia’s Migration Act 1958, has come to occupy a protected and ‘acceptable’ legal and political category, by virtue of their perceived genuineness under a legally ‘determinate’ trail of official paperwork (Turner, 2002, p. 22). As Turner (2002) demonstrates, the discourse of the ‘genuine’ (and therefore acceptable) refugee is bound up in images and metaphors of the helpless victim of persecution, carrying ‘valid’ written evidence of their legitimate claim for crossing national borders. This image of genuine victimhood, and therefore trustworthiness and ‘familiarity’, remains diametrically opposed in prevailing political discourses to the ‘undocumented’, transgressive and ‘unfamiliar’ asylum seeker; one who carries no visible ‘evidence’ of their validity as ‘victim’, and thus stands as potential fraud and foe (Turner, 2002). The power of such ideological justifications for the detainment and disciplining of asylum seekers in Australia is incredibly pervasive. The deeply embedded social constructions, anxieties and conten4

Sibley (1995) similarly uses Douglas’ foundational work in his examination of geographies of exclusion and border crossings.

tions bound up in the border crossings of asylum seekers remain central to the continued presence of the detention system in the national landscape and imagination. This is despite substantial evidence to contradict asylum seekers’ ‘disingenuous’ reputation. For instance, although the personal histories of persecution and trauma which asylum seekers must recount are subject to a high degree of suspicion and skepticism by interviewing officials throughout the process of determining their claims (Silove, 2003; Sultan and O’Sullivan, 2001), Federal Government statistics show that 85% of detained asylum seekers in Australia are eventually recognised as genuine refugees (Steel and Silove, 2001). As Steel and Silove (2001) argue, this high rate of approval in the determination process shows that a majority of asylum seekers have ‘officially’ suffered at least the same level of persecution as those who have come to Australia as ‘genuine’ refugees or with other ‘valid documentation’ under the Migration Act 1958. Silove (2003, p. 75) reaffirms this irony in his review of research into the mental health of asylum seekers, arguing that on average, detained asylum seekers demonstrate experiences of persecution and trauma consistent with the overall level of persecution experienced by displaced populations as a whole. Moreover, there exist stark differences in the refugee determination ‘approval rates’ between detained asylum seekers (of whom 85% are eventually granted refugee status), and community-based asylum seekers who entered Australia with a valid visa (of whom just 28% were granted refugee status in 1998) (Hosking et al., 1998, p. 20). As Steel and Silove (2001) argue, this may be an indicator that detained asylum seekers are in fact more likely to have had a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ prior to displacement (UNHCR, 2003), and hence to be ‘genuine’, legally protected refugees, than their asylum seeker compatriots who entered Australia with ‘valid’ documentation. Despite this evidence, the prevailing criminalising discourses surrounding the undocumented asylum seeker continue to imprison them within a system of control and discipline throughout the determination process. Although the Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIC)5 (formerly the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) 5 See: DIC website: ‘Immigration Detention Contract’ Schedule 2. Detention Services. /http://www.immi.gov.au/detention/ group4/002_schedule_2.pdfS.

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(DIMA, 2007) asserts that immigration detention has been established as a setting for administrative rather than punitive purposes, the detention space fits the model of disciplinary power outlined by Foucault (1977) in his analytical framework of the panopticon. Designed as a prison by the architect Jeremy Bentham, the panopticon is an annular building that has a peripheral ring of individual cells, facing out to a central guarded tower. Each cell has two windows, one facing the tower and the other the outside, assuring constant backlighting. Prisoners are thus constantly aware of the minute regulation of bodily and other visible activities, and the power this provides to the unseen guards. Bentham hailed the design as revolutionary for it reversed the principles of the dungeon to deprive of light and to hide, and instead uses visibility as its trap (Foucault, 1977, p. 200). While there are differences in the planning of IDCs and the panopticon, it is not the empirical accuracy of Bentham’s design that is of concern, but the principles and mechanisms of disciplinary power that are of importance to this argument. The physical location and architectural features of IDCs are modelled on prisons, in that they aim to maximise surveillance, visibility and confinement, in order to maximise disciplinary power. Daily routines and everyday aspects of life (such as freedom of movement, choice and range of food, clothing and bedding; the ability to access health and legal services, to enjoy recreation, to work and learn, and to contact family and friends), are subject to the approval, surveillance, restrictions and rules of detention staff, government officials and the detention space itself. As Koutroulis (2003) (a mental health nurse who formerly worked with asylum seekers in the now closed Woomera Detention Centre) argues, every aspect of an asylum seeker’s life is regimented by queues, paperwork, procedures and the constant presence of authorities. Stoller (2003, p. 2265) refers to the regimentation of spaces within the modern, predominantly western prison as ‘fragile homes’ for inmates, vulnerable at any time to destruction and invasion by the panoptic system of control which governs the prison. Foucault (1977, p. 140) similarly writes of such ‘meticulousness of y regulations, the fussiness of y inspections, the supervision of the smallest fragment of life and of the body y in the context of the school, the barracks, the hospital or the workshop y’. As in detention centres, the ultimate purpose of these ‘infinitesimal observations’ is

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control via technologies of power, and (as described in Foucault’s later works on sexuality and governmentality), the micro-level technologies of the self. While we recognise Foucault’s own theoretical shift in understanding power (from a hegemonic force to technologies of self (Foucault, 1980)), the regimentation of IDCs ultimately restricts the freedom and autonomy of asylum seekers and places control thoroughly in the grasp of the detention space and those who hold authority. Fragile states: embodying anti-place At the centre of asylum seekers’ experiences of the IDC, there is an overwhelming sense of the detention space as a prison. In the words of one formerly detained asylum seeker, ‘[We are] not refugees here; we are prisoners in this country, being bashed up and beaten’ (Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2001, p. 104). Among the long term detained, its design and purpose create a sense of being unjustly confined, isolated and deprived of power; of ‘languish[ing] in detention without a crime’ (Amor and Austin, 2003, p. 106). These feelings of injustice, estrangement and loss of control are experienced through the architecture, location and processes of the IDC space itself, and are bound up in the very nature of the detention space as an institutional ‘site’ or ‘antiplace’. In his book, The Fate of Place, Casey (1997) refers to the site or the ‘anti-place’ in the growing tendency of modern spaces (such as institutions) to act as limited, rigid, ‘thinned-out’ settings. Drawing upon the work of Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, he describes such ‘sites’ as the: y leveled-down, emptied-out, planiform residuum of place and space eviscerated of their actual and virtual powers and forced to fit the requirements of institutions that demand certain very particular forms of building. (Casey, 1997, p. 183) As Casey (1993, 1997, 2001) argues, a salient feature of the site is its emphasis on ‘situating’ objects and people within an unending system of relative, dehumanising, highly circumscribed positions. Rather than nurturing and encompassing the rich, dynamic nuances of meaning, position and identity which are characteristic of ‘place’, the site restricts and controls those who inhabit it, both physically and socially. By limiting the depth and

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range of meaning and social mobility typically inscribed in place, Casey (2001) proposes that sites also put limits on the building of identity, social meaning, connection and the negotiation of space. Casey’s (1993) descriptions of site as ‘eviscerated place’ (p. 185), the ‘antidote to place’ (p. 186), and ‘the very undoing of place, its dismantling into punctiform positions y predelineated and precise’ (p. 186) strongly invoke its nature as the ‘anti-place’: an institutionalised, functionally driven regulation and division of space. These anti-places are not simply implicated in poor mental health, but are crucial to understanding the connections between place and ill-health. In the following section, we examine the embodied effects of anti-place on asylum seekers, arguing that a more nuanced reading of place is required in order to capture the simultaneous closed, yet suspended, nature of space. Suspended in time: liminality and mental illness The anthropological literature on liminality is useful to understanding the links between anti-place and mental health. Van Gennep (1960) and Turner’s (1982) concept of rites of passage and transition provide a framework to understand how people move from one state of being to another in traditional (and modern) societies, particularly through the use of myth and ritual. The basic premise is that one is separated from the main social group, enters a state of liminality (of anomalous betwixt and between), and is finally returned to the group, transformed into a different status. Several authors (Barrett, 1998; Frankenberg, 1986; Murphy et al., 1988) have used this concept of liminality to understand certain states of disease (notably chronic illness such as schizophrenia and disability) and the stigma applied to transitional modes of being. Turner himself declares that ‘liminality may be the scene of disease, death, despair, suicide, the breakdown without compensatory replacement of normative social ties and bonds. It may be anomie, alienation, angst, the three fatal Alpha sisters of many myths’ (Turner, 1982, p. 46). This liminal state is precisely where asylum seekers find themselves; taken away from their homelands and stripped of personhood, they occupy an indeterminate space in which they are rendered structurally invisible. The uncertain and prolonged duration of liminality means that detainees are not reincorporated into society, but become

trapped in a permanent and frozen liminal state. The effect of this suspended liminality, as Turner might suggest, is to lock detainees in a state of transition which not only restricts their own movement through space and time, but renders their personhood and status anomalous. They have no way of knowing whether they will leave the IDC as a person with a temporary protection visa or be repatriated home as an illegal non-person. Suspension in time and space engenders tremendous uncertainty about the future and magnifies the sense of lost freedom and connection. Unlike criminals who know the parameters of their sentence, asylum seekers have no parameters or limits, and spend hours looking into the unbounded spaces that surround detention centres. Such boredom and frustration is conflated with a growing sense of helplessness and hopelessness. ‘Boredom is a big problem,’ one asylum seeker wrote to the HREOC in 1997, ‘we do not y know what our future is y In the detention centre we pass a day as if it were a year, all our hopes dashed to pieces, despaired, puzzled’ (HREOC, 1998, p. 221). Steel et al. (2004, p. 528) found that boredom was the primary experience for children and posed a serious problem during the time spent within the detention centre environment. This ‘stretched out’, liminal experience of space and time acts, as Silove (2003) argues, to imprison asylum seekers within a ‘continuum of anxiety’ and despair, where past traumas and future uncertainties are exacerbated and continuous with a psychologically corrosive present, embedded in the IDC space itself. The effects of this continuum of anxiety are encapsulated by Amal: I was carrying a mountain of burdens when I came seeking hope, seeking asylum in Australia. My expectation was Australia would remove the burden from me. Unfortunately, upon my arrival, my burdens increased and my suffering led me to a new state of madness in Australia. (Samira et al., 2001, p. 1) In this way, the temporo-spatial restrictions of the detention centre become embodied by asylum seekers, practiced and reproduced in the routines and mundane activities of their daily lives. The stripping of personhood that occurs in suspended liminality goes hand in hand with the dehumanising treatment of asylum seekers. Authors such as Koutroulis (2003), Silove (2003), McGorry (2002), Sultan and O’Sullivan (2001) and Phillips (2000) argue that practices within IDCs have the

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effect of ‘transforming human to animal’ (Koutroulis, 2003, p. 383), and asylum seeker into criminal. Koutroulis (2003, p. 383), for example, describes the Woomera IDC nursing management’s decision to administer medication to asylum seekers through a wire fence ‘like animals in a zoo, fed at particular times of the day fodder that was their due’ (2003, p. 383) as an ethically appalling attempt to deny the legitimacy of asylum seekers’ protests by dehumanising and demoralising them. A similar notorious example of dehumanisation occurred at Abu Ghraib, where Iraqi prisoners were photographed naked with dog leashes around their necks. In these examples, asylum seekers are bestowed with the particular cultural meanings of a ‘bare life’, a form of existence where human and political rights are separated and suspended, and in which asylum seekers are denied human rights taken for granted by citizenship (Agamben, 1998). It is the anomalous positioning of those trapped in liminal spaces which afford such bare life. As well as these dehumanising dimensions, the detention anti-place acts to criminalise asylum seekers through the use of solitary confinement, and the practice of addressing asylum seekers by an assigned number rather than their names (HREOC, 2001). There are obvious parallels to the way in which convicted prisoners are identified within the penal system, as this detainee explains: When I arrive in this country I had a name and my feeling was the same as human but for two years I have been called by initials and a number and I don’t feel and think now the same as human. (Amor and Austin, 2003, p. 136) Likewise, the use of handcuffs when transporting or restraining asylum seekers, and the fact that the process of determining refugee claims views asylum seekers as ‘guilty until proven innocent’ (Phillips, 2000), confirms their insertion into criminalised discourses. The emotional distancing between detention staff and asylum seekers which is achieved through liminality, dehumanising and criminalising practices, effectively strips away the identities of asylum seekers in exchange for an objectified prisoner identity: a body which is counted, herded, monitored and controlled (Stoller, 2003; Philo, 2001; Foucault, 1977). Personal vulnerabilities to mental health problems and/or posttraumatic stress from previous experiences are significantly worsened by

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these oppressive conditions, resulting in the forms of severe psychological deterioration which have been well documented in a number of rigorous studies (Silove, 2003; Koutroulis, 2003; McGorry, 2002; Sultan and O’Sullivan, 2001; Phillips, 2000). Ultimately, the embodiment and daily practice of dehumanising and criminalising practices undermine and transform fundamental attributes of what it means to be a person. Resisting the anti-place Pugliese (2002, p. 2) argues that it is this ‘violence of imprisonment in-infinitude’ that is ‘surely the locus of madness and the despair that generates the uprising and revolts in the detention centres’. Despite the play of power in detention centres, asylum seekers are not simply ‘docile bodies’ as in Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power (Foucault, 1977, pp. 138–139), but resist the forces that oppress them. In fact, resistance to the conditions of detention becomes a major way through which asylum seekers negotiate and deal with their experiences of the IDC. Rather than ‘culturally alien’ plays at ‘attention seeking’, the popularly publicised suicide attempts, acts of protest (including mass hunger strikes and lip sewing), attempted escapes, and violence within detention centres are an embodied revolt against detention structures and practices. This is not to romanticise resistance or violence, but to bring the focus back to the body, and its central importance as an embodied site of resistance. Such embodied resistance has been documented from a clinical perspective. Sultan and O’Sullivan (2001), for example, paint a disturbing picture of the psychological impact wrought by the progressive loss of modes of expression and resistance over time as asylum seekers come to negotiate the corrosive conditions of long-term detention. Through his observations and interactions with compatriot detained asylum seekers, Sultan was able to describe what he saw as four stages in mental state, depressive symptoms and morale over the detention period, coinciding with key stages in the process of determining asylum seekers’ refugee claims. Following an initial period of shock and disbelief at being detained, a rejection at the primary stage of the determination process would for most asylum seekers coincide with the development of a ‘primary depressive stage’ (Sultan and O’Sullivan, 2001). This stage was marked by symptoms of clinical

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depression, the return of PTSD symptoms in vulnerable individuals, a growing sense of injustice and uncertainty, and what Sultan labelled a ‘primary revolt stage’ of protest, anger or advocacy (Sultan and O’Sullivan, 2001). Transition to a secondary stage of depression usually occurred within 6–18 months of detention, following a rejection from the Refugee Review Tribunal (a crucial one-off appeal stage in the determination process). The secondary depressive stage was marked by an increase in the severity of depression; acts of self-harm, including hunger strikes, cutting, lip-sewing and even suicide attempts; pervasive anxiety about the future; social withdrawal and isolation; feelings of anger and rage, and a more passive stage of revolt and resistance to authority (Sultan and O’Sullivan, 2001). Sultan also observed a smaller number of detained asylum seekers who went on to experience a more severe state of mental distress, which he characterised as the ‘tertiary depressive stage’. This stage was distinguished from the secondary stage by the intensity of feelings of hopelessness, despair and anxiety, and by a growing sense of rage, distrust and ‘paranoia’ directed at authority figures and the government (Sultan and O’Sullivan, 2001). Acts of self-harm and self-mutilation also became more frequent during this stage. Some asylum seekers went on to develop psychotic symptoms, including ‘delusions’ of persecution, auditory hallucinations, dissociation and profound social withdrawal (Sultan and O’Sullivan, 2001). Moving away from such clinical understandings, these descriptions of revolt, protest and self-harm can be understood as a political and embodied expression of resistance to the panoptic, alienating system of control at work within the IDC as antiplace. In the absence of any other means of resistance, asylum seekers are forced to use their bodies as symbolic instruments of revolt. Bourdieu (1991), in his analysis of symbolic power, argues that people in subordinate positions (such as asylum seekers in detention) participate in subjection in order to neutralise its effects. Stripped of alternative means of protest, asylum seekers use their bodies in such symbolically potent gestures to give voice to their anxiety. Silove (2003), Koutroulis (2003) and Turner (2002) have similarly argued that these protests are bodily expressions of a desperate hope for freedom and control which is progressively eroded throughout the detention period, and which has been exacerbated for many by experiences of

persecution and oppression prior to seeking asylum in Australia. The use of punitive measures by detention centre staff to contain and control these acts of resistance only adds to the trauma of asylum seekers. Examples of punitive responses to mental distress abound. HREOC Inquiries and accounts by Koutroulis (2003) and Sultan and O’Sullivan (2001) have, for example, revealed the use of ‘observation rooms’6 as a form of solitary confinement and surveillance for asylum seekers who have engaged in acts of self-harm and/or protest. The use of threats by detention staff to subdue protestors is also common, and in their attempts to curb protests, detention centre staff have reaffirmed the ‘panopticism’ structure of detention by threatening asylum seekers with the fear of constant watching and recording, and that any action may be used against them in the refugee determination process.

Conclusion In this paper, we have drawn from the work of Foucault, Casey and the anthropologies of space and place to argue that place is not marginal to mental health, but that marginality can increase mental health issues. In particular, we have highlighted the pivotal role that detention locations, architecture and practices play in the rising incidence of poor mental health for Australia’s asylum seekers. The very positioning of detention centres in marginalised and often uninhabitable Australian lands creates a profound sense of isolation. The physical structures are similarly alienating in their prison like architecture, where the iron gates and barbed wire speak of danger and confinement. Like Silove and other commentators, we argue that these physical environments are central to the increasing incidence of mental health issues amongst asylum seekers. However, in using Foucauldian ideas of surveillance and Casey’s anti-place, we move beyond current understandings that envisage a cause and effect model between physical structures (spaces) and mental health. Surveillance and anti-place allow us to examine the ways in which spaces are 6 As Koutroulis (2003) comments, the Federal Government denies the official existence of ‘cells’ in detention centres. ‘Observation room’ is a euphemistic title for a cell-like solitary confinement space in detention centres such as Woomera and Baxter.

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embodied, and how bodies experience the uncertain spatio-temporal dimensions of detention, such as continual monitoring and liminality. Low and Lawrence-Zuniga, in their anthropological approach to space and place, argue that ‘spatial analyses often neglect the body because of difficulties in resolving the dualism of the subjective and objective body, and distinctions between the material and representational aspects of body space’ (Low and Lawrence-Zuniga, 2003, p. 2). Rather than separate mind and bodies, we have used the concept of embodied space to underscore the ways in which detention environments not only physically restrain asylum seekers, but become embodied, practiced and resisted in everyday lives. It is the intense management and administration of everyday lives, coupled with the experiences of stretched out, liminal spaces, that leads to embodied distress. The distress of detained asylum seekers cannot be readily explained away by the trauma they may have experienced during earlier struggles with persecution or displacement alone. Steel et al. (2004, p. 534) report a three-fold increase in psychiatric disorders for adults subsequent to detention (and an alarming ten-fold increase for children). These authors also highlight that such prevalence rates were substantially higher than those found in general refugee populations, including children, who had not been in detention. What is most disturbingly about this evidence, and what has already been pointed out in this paper (yet seems to be overlooked in public discourses), is that 85% of all asylum seekers are found to be legitimate refugees and are able to stay in Australia. Despite this evidence, the dehumanising and criminalising practices of Australia’s immigration detention centres continue to be upheld. A recent article by Fazel and Silove (2006, p. 251) in the British Medical Journal states that ‘Australia has given up mandatory detention because it damages detainees’ mental health’. This is not the case. In 2005, and bowing to public pressure (including opposition from within their own Government) and a series of high profile and damaging detention mistakes,7 the Australian Federal Government introduced what they termed a ‘softer edge’ to 7

In 2005, it came to light that Australian permanent resident (Cornelia Rau, who suffers from schizophrenia) was mistakenly taken for an illegal immigrant and had been locked up in the Baxter Detention Centre for ten months. The Federal Inquiry into this case (the Palmer Inquiry, 2005) was highly critical of detention centres and the inadequacies of mental health care.

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mandatory detention. This includes releasing families with children into community detention, introduction of time limits on claim assessment, the promise of better conditions within centres, and greater efficiency in the granting of temporary protection visas. The Federal Government has not changed the law or policy framework on mandatory detention, but made some concessions whilst simultaneously continuing to expand ‘off-shore processing’. As long as the inhumane design of Australia’s detention policy maintains its hold over the political and social landscape, it stands to harbour profoundly troubling implications for the future welfare and wellbeing of some of the world’s most marginalised people. These potentially damaging effects of prolonged detention stand as a stark warning to other countries (like the UK) who seem to be pursuing Australia’s policy of detention.

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