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Immigration Detention: The Migration of a Policy and Its Human Impact, by Amy Nethery and Stephanie J Silverman (eds.)
No full textBook review
Immigration Detention: The Migration of a Policy and Its Human Impact
Edited by Amy Nethery and Stephanie J. Silverman
London: Routledge, 2015, 182 pp
Book review: Immigration detention: the migration of a policy and its human impact edited by Amy Nethery and Stephanie J. Silverman
Full text linkThe collection Immigration Detention: The Migration of a Policy and its Human Impact, edited by Amy Nethery and Stephanie J. Silverman, gives an overview of the practice and human impact of detention as an integral part of immigration management and control through a series of country case studies. While Gayle Munro would have welcomed more direct engagement with individual detainee experiences and voices, this book gives comprehensive and relevant insight into detention policies and practices at a time when Europe is grappling with how to respond to pressure on its borders
Calling to account
No full textHuman Rights Overboard: Seeking Asylum in Australia
Linda Briskman, Susie Latham and Chris Goddard
Scribe, 35
Reviewed by Amy Nethery
BY EARLY 2003, Mohammad Mastipour, an Iranian national, and his seven-year-old daughter Massoumeh had been detained at Baxter immigration detention centre for two years. Due to harassment from other detainees, Mohammad had requested that they be moved to another centre. On 8 July, after months of inaction from centre management, Mohammad began a hunger strike to draw attention to their situation. On 14 July, five guards entered the father and daughter’s room and attempted to strip-search Mohammad, but he refused to comply in front of his daughter. He was handcuffed and taken to the “management unit” (solitary confinement). He was allowed to see his daughter, who had no other carers, for 90 minutes each day at 5pm. On 23rd July, Massoumeh was deported to her mother in Iran without Mohammad’s knowledge or consent. That same day, Mohammad complained that he had not had the usual visit from his daughter. Detention management told him she was playing with friends and would visit the next day. When she failed to appear the following day, Mohammad was told she was already in Iran. He broke down, and was kept for the next six weeks in solitary confinement in a room with only a mattress, 24 hour lighting and constant CCTV surveillance. Two years later, Mohammad was found to be a refugee and was released from detention.
This story is just one of hundreds of accounts of the treatment of detainees in Australia’s immigration detention centres recorded in Human Rights Overboard. By itself, the story of Mohammad and Massoumeh Mastipour is a shocking tale. It has, however, many elements that are repeated throughout this book with alarming frequency: the length of time adults and children are kept in detention; the use of extended periods of isolation as punishment; the exposure of children to violence and the mental deterioration of their parents; the deliberate inaction and cruel misinformation given to detainees from detention staff; and the distress of detainees caused by the powerlessness of their situation.
The research for Human Rights Overboard was motivated by the Cornelia Rau scandal. Like many other people, the authors were concerned that the behaviour of a woman with psychosis held for ten months in Baxter detention centre could seem normal to authorities, and that authorities did nothing about her despite repeated calls by her fellow detainees. If Rau’s behaviour was deemed normal and ignored, what else was happening in detention? The terms of reference of the Palmer inquiry into the Rau case did not extend to detainees in general. So, the Australian Council of the Heads of Schools of Social Work, led by Linda Briskman, Suzie Latham and Chris Goddard and under the oversight of Justice Marcus Einfeld AO QC, started their own inquiry. Their “People’s Inquiry into Detention” travelled around the country taking verbal and written submissions from anyone who had anything to do with detention. The result is a book with over 400 pages of accounts that provide testimony to tragic impact of Australia’s immigration detention centres.
Why publish another book about immigration detention? Because no other book has approached the topic in such a comprehensive and systemic way, outlining each aspect of the policy and its impact in turn. The book documents the experiences of all detainees, including residents who have had their visas cancelled, visa overstayers, and foreign fishermen. These other categories of detainee are often excluded from the literature on immigration detention that has emphasised the role of detention in keeping people out, and underplaying its equally important function in removing people already living in the community. Importantly, Human Rights Overboard includes the voices of advocates, detention staff, and Commonwealth officers, including members of the Australian navy who speak about what they were asked to do in the name of border security. Written like a government inquiry report, the authors allow the words of the detainees and others to speak for themselves, and leave it to the reader to judge the efficacy of the policy.
The focus of Human Rights Overboard, nevertheless, is on the treatment of asylum seekers subject to immigration detention. Between November 1992 and July 2008, the policy of mandatory detention provided that all asylum seekers who arrived in Australia by boat without a valid entry visa would be kept in immigration detention until their applications for protection were granted, or they were removed from the country. Over 90 per cent of asylum seekers who arrived in Australia this way were eventually found to be refugees and allowed to settle in Australia.
The book covers all aspects of government policy as it affects this group of asylum seekers. It follows the dangerous journey to Australia from Indonesia by boat, a journey that was more perilous after 2001 with the introduction of Operation Relex. This policy required that the Australian navy use everything within its power to keep boats of asylum seekers out of Australian waters, including firing at vessels, dragging them back to international waters and, in at least one case, sabotaging an engine. The book also covers the complicated and drawn out application process that can leave asylum seekers in limbo, and in detention, for years. Finally, it covers the time out of detention, and the experiences of asylum seekers on different visas, including the Temporary Protection Visa, now abolished, which did not allow rights to travel or family reunion, and the Bridging Visa E, which does not allow the visa-holder to work, study or receive any form of welfare benefit, leaving them entirely dependent on charity.
Mostly, Human Rights Overboard focuses on the experiences and treatment of people in immigration detention. The book examines the physical conditions of detention: the lack of services and facilities, including in some cases the lack of sufficient toilets and running water; the impact on children, including the high rate of mental illness and self-harm amongst children; the mental health issues within the adult population; the violence, abuse and degrading treatment from guards; the use of isolation, for times well beyond the limits of use in the prison and psychiatric systems; deportations, often carried out in the middle of the night with physical and chemical restraints; and the lack of access to the centres for lawyers and journalists, politicians and other human rights organisations to provide a measure of accountability and transparency. The effect of the stories contained within the book is cumulative. By the end, the reader is left with the picture of a system designed to punish and humiliate detainees, operating outside norms and standards of ethical behaviour, and contrary to our international human rights obligations.
Human Rights Overboard describes a contradictory system. On one hand, many procedural decisions about particular cases in detention were micro-managed by the immigration department, and in some cases directly by immigration ministers Ruddock, Vanstone and Andrews. That the department knew about the poor conditions is evidenced by the superficial upgrades given to the centres before United Nations inspections. The department and the ministers also knew about the experiences of detainees, not least from the letters they received from the many concerned Australians, and some detention staff, who wrote on detainees’ behalf. On the other hand, however, the book describes how the same department and ministers repeatedly failed to respond to requests from detainees, advocates and human rights organizations for basic medical care, access to lawyers, information on the progress of visas, and a basic level of accountability. How do we account for this contradiction in approach? The answer perhaps lies with Philip Ruddock’s statement that detention is “not a holiday camp,” and the assertion by immigration officials that “we don’t want to make it so nice for them in detention that they won’t want to leave.” The reader is left with the impression that inaction from the government was an action in itself. For the abuses to human rights, then, the former Howard government must be held to account.
There is no doubt that immigration detention is a system designed to deter, punish and humiliate detainees. Yet the abuse of the human rights of detainees cannot be entirely attributed to the system. Although there were many guards and detention staff who treated detainees well and with respect, there were many others who implemented daily petty abuses and acts of serious violence upon the detainees. The ABC program Four Corners screened on 15 September described a group of guards, recruited from prisons, as the “crash and bash” cohort. This cohort was responsible, no doubt, for the episode when four guards pushed to the floor and handcuffed a female detainee because she hid some bread down the front of her dress to feed to her three children between the designated meal times. Or the random acts of violence against children, including the time that a visitor to the centre witnessed a female guard kick a four-year-old child who was playing on the ground. For these examples of abuse, individuals must be held to account.
On 29 July this year, the Rudd government made important modifications to the policy of mandatory detention, limiting the use of detention for health and security checks in the majority of cases. This policy shift must be applauded. It is the result of years of advocacy of many people within the Australian community, including the hundreds who contributed their efforts to the People’s Inquiry. For many, however, this policy change has come too late. It is too late for the nineteen people who died in detention (twelve of whom died between January 2001 and June 2003), and for the people who have died after deportation. It is also too late for the children and babies who have lost years of crucial developmental time in a harsh and abusive environment, and for the adults who, according to psychiatric assessment, will continue to experience mental illness for the rest of their lives. In addition, it is still unclear what is going to happen with the newly constructed 400 million detention centre on Christmas Island, or how the policy will effect the Indonesian fishermen and people who have had their residency visas cancelled, who are still detained without trial. Human Rights Overboard now stands as a document in evidence of the tragic outcome of Australian policy. As a nation, we must do everything possible to ensure that such human rights abuses are not committed again in our name. •
Amy Nethery is a PhD candidate at Deakin University examining immigration detention.
Photo: Andrew Jeffre
Interrogating the migration industry
Full text linkRezension zu:
Ruben Andersson, Illegality, Inc. (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014)
Amy Nethery and Stephanie J. Silverman (eds.), Immigration Detention: The Migration of a Policy and its Human Impact. (London and New York: Routledge, 2015
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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