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ABSTRACT
Detention centres and return programmes are increasingly important instruments of border control across Europe. In 2014, the U.K. Home Office removed Assisted Voluntary Return (AVR) from detention, meaning it is no longer available to detainees. Drawing on both secondary data analysis of interviews with welfare staff in an Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) and Home Office senior managers and primary data from follow-on interviews with welfare staff and NGO workers, the paper analyses the Home Office rationale behind this withdrawal. Using this policy change as a lens reveals how through a responsibilisation discourse inherent in Home Office policy the subject of the ‘detainee’ is criminalised and framed as non-compliant and thus undeserving of ‘privileges’, such as AVR, in an increasingly punitive space. In contrast, both welfare officers and NGO workers frame detainees in a more nuanced, sometimes contradictory, manner; recognising the role of the state in creating vulnerabilities. By examining how dominant forms of discrimination are held in place by the banal ways categories are repeated in everyday discourse, this paper highlights the increasing pathologisation of deviance and framing of detainees as criminal ‘other’. As such it contributes to debates on the contradictory world of detention and the sociology of punishment.
Acknowledgements
I acknowledge the contribution of my colleagues who worked on the ESRC funded research project Tried and Trusted? The Role of NGOs in the Assisted Voluntary Return of Refused Asylum Seekers and Irregular Migrants on which this paper is partially based: Professor Bridget Anderson, COMPAS, University of Oxford, Professor Derek McGhee, University of Southampton and Dr Claire Bennett.Footnote10 The paper draws from my dissertation submitted for the MRes in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 http://www.fmreview.org/detention/koch.html; http://assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=http://assembly.coe.int/Documents/AdoptedText/ta10/eRES1742.htm.
2 Although I would agree with Andrijasevic and Walters (Citation2010) that the voluntariness of voluntary return programmes is more about the organisational modality of the programmes than migrant choice. In Tried and Trusted?, it was apparent that most, not all, NGOs in the refugee sector had shifted their position to one of grudging acceptance of AVR as a ‘lesser of two evils’ and were less antagonistic towards it as a policy than previously. A fact apparent in that Refugee Action, an NGO with 30 years’ experience supporting refugees took on the running of the programme for several years (for discussion, see McGhee, Bennett and Walker [Citation2016]).
3 There are three separate programmes, one for irregular migrants, another for people who have sought asylum and a third for families. Most European countries have some form of AVR programme to facilitate the return of refused (exhausted all legal options) asylum seekers and irregular migrants. For further information on AVR, see McGhee, Bennet and Walker (Citation2016).
4 It is beyond the scope and objectives of this study to expand on this debate.
5 For more information, see http://www.refugee-action.org.uk/assets/0001/2609/The_Future_of_AVR_briefing_27_July_2015.pdf.
6 Permission was granted not to anonymise this participant. I sent him the transcript via email and queried whether he wished to remain anonymous or not and he was happy to be cited.
7 I am grateful to the PIs of Tried and Trusted? for the introduction of this framework.
8 Cited 3 March 2015 Refugee Action press release: http://www.refugee-action.org.uk/about/media_centre/our_news/1485_refugee_action_echoes_mps_urgent_call_for_immigration_detention_reform.
9 Reports available from http://www.aviddetention.org.uk/immigration-detention/detention-inspections/hm-inspectorate-prisons.
10 Tried and Trusted? was a collaborative research project between the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) Centre for Population Change, based at the University of Southampton, and COMPAS, based at the University of Oxford, funded by the ESRC (ESRC award number RES-625-25-0001). See https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/project/tried-and-trusted-the-role-of-ngos-in-the-assisted-voluntary-returns-of-asylum-seekers-and-irregular-migrants/.