The Management of Anxiety. An Ethnographical Outlook on Self-mutilations in a French Immigration Detention Centre

Abstract

This contribution examines the management of self-mutilations of detained immigrants awaiting deportation in French immigration detention centres. Drawing on ethnographic data, it analyses the struggles opposing members of detention staff over the prevention of self-inflicted wounds and the regulation of immigrant anxiety. They unfold around a contradiction: detention centres are not only a violent police institution, but also a 'humanitarian' realm, where extreme suffering calls for immediate relief. I first describe the 'risk assessment system' organised inside the detention centre to prevent mutilations through medical expertise. I then focus on practical dilemmas faced by Human Rights advocates operating inside detention centres.

‘We Deport Them but They Keep Coming Back’: The Normalcy of Deportation in the Daily Life of ‘Undocumented’ Zimbabwean Migrant Workers in Botswana

“…The CII is under the authority of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship and is administered under provisions in the Prisons Act and the general prison code. In contrast to detention centres such as that described by Fischer (2014), there is no provision for non-state actors to provide medical, social or legal services to deportees at the CII. In addition to Zimbabwean deportees, it houses small numbers of asylum seekers and 'undocumented' migrants from other countries.…”

Deportation Studies: Origins, Themes and Directions

“…Kalir argues that stigmatisations of migrants are thus linked to anxiety about anti-Semitic persecution, and that such critical rhetoric depoliticises the structural violence experienced by migrants. Even intermediaries, such as NGO representatives or care workers who provide services to detainees, perform 'emotion work' as they carry out their institutional responsibilities while contending with the traumas recounted or performed by migrants (Fischer 2014).…”

“…For instance, according to Kalir (2014), Israeli NGOs that appeal to Jewish history in order to generate compassion for migrants reproduce the very trauma that shapes officials' anti-immigrant rhetoric. Similarly, French care workers who work in deportation centres where some detainees resort to self-mutilations must navigate potential complicity with guards, who attempt to control detainees' behaviour, and adherence to humanitarian goals of respecting detainees' autonomy (Fischer 2014). And, in the UK, anti-deportation campaign organisers fail to acknowledge foreign-national offenders' senses that they may be partially to blame for their own legal predicaments (Hasselberg 2014).…”

Balancing Legitimacy, Exceptionality and Accountability: On Foreign-national Offenders' Reluctance to Engage in Anti-deportation Campaigns in the UK

“…In these settings, as the agency of detained migrants is limited, acts of protest, resistance and contestation tend to take the form of hunger strikes (see e.g. McGregor 2011), self-harm and suicide attempts (Nyers 2008;Fischer 2014) or the destruction of identity documents (Ellermann 2010). Confinement may also have a politicising effect in detainees, through the realisation that they are rights-bearing subjects (Peutz 2007) Immigrants' political action is seldom enacted in isolation.…”