Countering isolation with the use of technology: how asylum-seeking detainees on islands in the Indian Ocean use social media to transcend their confinement

Abstract

Governments detain asylum seekers on islands across the Indian Ocean region, including Australia's Christmas Island, Papua New Guinea's Manus Island, Nauru, and across the Indonesian archipelago. Scholars and advocates alike have shown that the ambiguous jurisdiction and complex legal migration statuses that emerge in these areas, as well as their remote location and isolation, contribute to their popularity as sites of migrant detention. The negative effects of isolation and remoteness on migrants' physical and mental health, as well as their legal outcomes, have been well documented. We argue, however, that detainees and others are countering the effects of isolation with the use of technology. Ethnographic research conducted on the islands within Australian and Indonesian migrant detention networks suggests that asylum seekers detained in remote sites across the region are combating the isolation of detention with the use of mobile phones, internet access, and social media networks. They communicate with friends, relatives, legal representatives, advocates, activists, and members of the public beyond prison walls to transmit information, facilitate advocacy inside and outside of detention facilities, and construct transnational support networks. In turn, punitive policies to discipline asylum seekers by limiting methods of communication threaten these efforts.

Keywords:

• island
• detention
• social media
• advocacy
• technology

Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award #0847133 (Principal Investigator: Alison Mountz). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes

1. The Department of Immigration has changed names several times since 2001. It is referred to throughout this text by its 2013 name, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP).

2. These statistics are based on the total numbers of asylum seekers detained on mainland, Christmas Island, Nauru, and Manus Island facilities as of October 2013 (Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship, 2013).

3. At the time that the report was released in December 2013, only one asylum application had been processed among those detained on the island.