Women’s Immigration Detention in Greece: Gender, Control and Capacity

Abstract

Despite sustained media and political interest in Greece as a key site of European border security, there is little academic scholarship about daily life in Greek detention centres. In this article we start to fill this gap, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Athens’ Central Holding Centre for immigrants, Petrou Ralli, in 2012. This chapter also contributes to feminist criminological accounts of border control that suggest that women and men’s experiences diverge in important ways, particularly in relation to experiences of immigration detention. What are women’s needs in detention? How do those who work in the detention centre view the women they lock up? What obstacles do detainees face, as women? How do they interpret their experiences? Using testimonies from detainees and the staff who work with them, we unveil the human impact of policies being implemented in response to transnational pressures from Brussels and to more local problems.

The fieldwork for this paper was conducted by Andriani Fili from November 2011 to February 2012, supported by the Oxford University Research Support Fund at the Faculty of Law as well as by the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship of Sharon Pickering. Mary Bosworth would also like to acknowledge funding from the European Research Council, Starter Grant 313362 in writing up the project. Where possible, interviews were digitally recorded and then fully transcribed and translated into English by Andriani Fili. Others were recorded in note form and then translated into English. All interviewees have been anonymised. More information about this ongoing research can be found at www.borderobservatory.org and http://bordercriminologies.law.ox.ac.uk.