Women and border policing at the edges of Europe

ABSTRACT

While states around the world have responded to mass mobility by increasing border policing, our knowledge of the daily reality of that form of policing remains limited. How migrant women are policed has been particularly neglected. The political and practical difficulty of examining the context, process and experience of border control practices appears often to be insurmountable. This article contributes to filling some of the gaps in our knowledge by drawing on ethnographic data collected over a 12-month period in Greek immigration detention centres from 2011 to 2012. In it we examine the experience of policing and irregular entry across the Greek Turkey border – an entry-point to Europe that is routinely regarded as being in crisis. As we will demonstrate, border policing at this site is capricious and unpredictable. It is also highly racialised and gendered.

KEYWORDS:

• Border policing
• women migrants
• Greece
• race and gender
• immigration detention
• intersectionality

Acknowledgement

Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 At the time of the research, the central holding facility for migrants in Athens was the only centre that held men, women and children in the city and was the main detention site that people from the border were transferred to. Most detention officers employed there had been seconded to the Evros border police as border officers. No independent academic research in it had previously been permitted.

2 Border officers are regular police officers on rotation of maximum three months because it is very difficult to find people who are locally established at border locations or who would be willing to relocate there for a longer stretches of time.

3 http://rrse-smi.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=d5f377f7f6f2418b8ebadaae638df2e1.

4 Integrated Program for Border Management and Combating Illegal Immigration presented on 07.09.11 to the Cabinet by the former Minister of Citizen Protection, Christos Papoutsis (see http://www.minocp.gov.gr/index.php?option=ozo_content&lang=&perform=view&id=3790&Itemid=513).

5 The policing of external borders has often been referred to as high policing – being driven by national security and international relations concerns (see Andreas 2010) and has been set against so called ‘low policing’ routinely regarded as the bread and butter policing we know and love in criminology. However, the Hellenic policing of the Greece–Turkey border does not neatly conform to this classification. Primarily because there is not a border policing apparatus clearly distinct from the civilian police – but rather they are largely one and the same. The same police are involved with the detection, interception, arrest and processing of irregular migrants at the physical border, their summary return to Turkey or entry into the asylum system, the arrest and round up of undocumented non-citizens, the operation of detention centres and deportation processes. The policing of irregular migrants is very much seen as part of the ordinary criminal policing continuum.

6 http://news247.gr/eidiseis/koinonia/arxhgos-el-as-gia-metanastes-na-toys-kanoyme-to-vio-aviwto.2561326.html.

7 The CPT has resorted to this action only another five times in the past; in 1992 and 1996 to Turkey and to Russia in 2001, 2003 and 2007 for the situation in Chechnya.

8 Named with savage irony, in reference, to the ancient Greek God Zeus to symbolise hospitality to and patronage of foreigners (Human Rights Watch 2013).

9 http://www.yptp.gr/index.php?option=ozo_content&lang=GR&perform=view&id=4736&Itemid=579 .

10 The newly established Asylum Service, which is the first Independent Authority dealing with asylum claims in Greece as provided for in P.D. 113/2013 and has Regional Offices inside and outside of Attica, began operating on 7th June 2013. The new Asylum Service is responsible for all new asylum applications and it was expected to fasten the asylum procedure and reduce the already existing backlog in the old system run by the Police. In 2015, there were still 23,324 applications pending from the old system. However, the acceptance rate has been risen up to 30.7% (for more on this http://www.asylumineurope.org/reports/country/greece).

11 This could be attributed to what Janet Roitman (2006) has termed as the ‘ethics of illegality’; that is, a space of ethics that is construed by people on the move, in which the use of illicit modes of travel (i.e. smuggler, fake documents, etc.), otherwise criminalised by European authorities, is normalised.

12 The white paper is an administrative notice written only in Greek which gives them 30 days to file for asylum or leave the country (HRW 2008).

13 Similarly, Pallister-Wilkins (2015) argues that the policing of groups who are both at risk and a risk (Aradau 2004), who are in need of both care and control, is a constant feature of the border police's daily work in Greece.

14 Transactional sex refers to the exchange of sex for material support, usually in the form of a relationship.

Additional information

Funding

This piece was funded by Mary Bosworth's European Research Council Starter Grant 313362, ‘Subjectivity, Identity and Penal Power’ and the University of Oxford Law Faculty's Research Support Fund as well as by Sharon Pickering's Australian Research Council Future Fellowship grant FT100100548, ‘Policing the border: security, human rights and gender’.