“Welcome to my new cage”, 30 year-old Iranian refugee Niki* told me in our first meeting in Australia. In 2018, after being at the risk of sudden death on Nauru, she was abruptly transferred to Brisbane by a charter jet, at midnight. Following the result of the federal election, she attempted suicide in a psychiatric hospital.
To adapt to imprisonment, Niki was working and studying. However, something affected her life dramatically. On Nauru, she was stopped by a group of local men, when she was travelling on her motorbike from work. She was sexually assaulted. “The perpetrators threatened her if she told her brother or went to the police, they would kill her and her brother”, IHMS psychiatrist reported.
Two weeks before Niki’s migration to Brisbane, an IHMS psychiatrist reported that she “is at the risk of sudden death due to prolonged starvation.” She was being fed through a tube. She had attempted suicide multiple times and slept with a knife close by.
After one month in a Brisbane hospital, she was forced to live in the Bita detention centre. On release she felt virtually locked in the Oakwood hotel for almost four months – an out of the frying pan into the fire experience. Finally, she was allowed to live in the community, but only on a community detention visa. This was not a means of liberation. Exposure to violence hindered her post-prison adjustment.
Since then, the specialists in Australia wrote to the Department of Home Affairs that only a return from Brisbane to a trusted friend in Melbourne would help. Her psychologist described her as “suicidal and fearful”.
Refugees transferred to Australia from Nauru for acute medical treatment have finished up in a detention centre or remained in a hotel for a prolonged period in order to receive a community detention visa.
Twenty-four-year-old refugee Negar told me: “I’m virtually living under house arrest in this hotel. Just as happened in my tent, the male Sercos spontaneously invaded my privacy by arriving in my room.”
These journeys at the edge of society seldom get to the centre. Mahbobeh, a 26-year-old Afghan woman, was transferred from Nauru to Sydney four years ago, but still lives with a community detention visa. Her freedom of movement to travel, to work and study is taken away.
It was easy to see that containment on Nauru was a form of state violence, but the daily hostility continues in Australia. Even the idea of relocation from a remote island to the mainland has not transformed their experience. It failed to cure, free and empower them.
In response to my questions about the deprivation of displaced women, concerning rights to education and work, and experiences of sexual assault in Australia’s detention centres, human rights commissioner, Ed Santow, said they had “not really done any detailed research in this specific area.”
Australian immigration officials and even NGOs have became people smugglers. Sent to sea by one group, asylum seekers are subsequently transferred to Australia by another. They might be protected from physical abuse when living in a tent, but they are not protected from official and unofficial discrimination.
The current politics of advocacy reinforces unequal power relations and needs reforming. A transnational feminist perspective should influence the ways in which decision makers produce such reform. We need to battle the immediate cruelty inflicted on refugee women as well as the roots of a system which facilitates apartheid and powerlessness.
Ironically, even refugees’ testimonies on the systematic state violence and their domestic abuse experiences are often sidelined. White feminism may be trying to combat violence against women, but may be overlooking the vulnerability of women of colour, not least those who are asylum seekers.
Working with media organisations, I had cases where key commentators on asylum issues turned out to be white lawyers, and where I was advised that referring to these views would “add weight to your story”. Such advice appears to reflect an accepted ideology, whereas the dozen pages of evidence provided by displaced women about their direct experiences will never be considered valid, never sufficiently weighty for the mainstream media.
Within politics and the media, patterns of dominance and inequality continue. More specifically, such an analysis might explain how power abuse is enacted, reproduced or legitimised by the behaviour of dominant groups and institutions.
Many Australian institutions collude in this censoring, silencing system. Experiences of deprivation remain largely unknown and invisible yet are a daily feature of these women’s lives. Concerns about humiliation are constant. The experience of being controlled never ends. Their struggles for power are eroded by a repeated experience of powerlessness. Official indifference stays secret, except to the refugee women.
A radical reconstruction agenda requires initiatives to enable victims of apartheid policies to recover. Asylum seekers have been stigmatised as subhuman. If refugees are to regain at least their self-respect, they will need to feel able to engage in meaningful participation in society. The opportunity for such participation will require a radical, economic, social and cultural transformation.
* Name has been changed
• Saba Vasefi is an academic, filmmaker and journalist. She is researching her PhD on Exilic Feminist Cinema Studies and teaching at Macquarie University
