Asylum seekers' experiences in Australia between 2012 and 2014: The Structural-Personal Interaction Process

Abstract

Social structures are intangible forms of human organisation in which people's everyday lives occur. They are therefore integral to understanding human experiences. Australia's policy context is a social structure that excludes asylum seekers from conditions that would fulfil their human rights. This research, using constructivist grounded theory methods, aims to understand the mechanisms through which Australia's policies contribute to the everyday life experiences of people seeking asylum in Australia. Participant observations took place in one detention centre and across two organisational settings in the community. Asylum seekers and those who work with them participated in informal key-informant interviews, formal semi-structured interviews, and surveys. Particular policy documents were reviewed, selected on their applicability to asylum seekers and their relevance to asylum seeker statuses. The ‘Structural-Personal Interaction Process’ was identified through analysis of the data. It illustrates interactions between structures (status and policy), and human beings (personal characteristics) to create human experiences. This process uses the participants’ language, which differs from human rights language. It explains how asylum seekers are assigned a status that determines relevant policies, which in turn, shape the situations that they encounter. These situations interact with individual personal characteristics to contribute to human experiences. Policies and situations that harm and protect asylum seekers are identified. Human experiences that result from the Structural-Personal Interaction are distributed along a continuum that spans from suffering (mental distress and having ‘nothing to do’) through to wellbeing (feeling hopeful, feeling safe, and 'having something to do'), referred to in this thesis as the suffering-wellbeing continuum. Drawing on this empirical analysis and existing theories, conceptualisations of suffering, wellbeing, harming, and protecting are explored. Mechanisms through which policies affect asylum seekers' everyday human experiences are considered in terms of emotional responses and engagement in meaningful activities. Each person's human experiences are unique, created out of an interaction between social structures and personal characteristics. Yet, a pattern of predominantly harming policies contribute to harming situations which are linked to a tendency for most asylum seekers' human experiences to lie in the suffering zone on the continuum, especially for people assigned the status 'person in detention'. This pattern illustrates the structural violence inflicted upon asylum seekers. Engagement in meaningful activities is a concept that flows from policy to human experience. The concept of engagement in meaningful activities embodies the human rights to engage in work, housing and privacy, education, welfare, freedom of movement, self-expression, an adequate standard of living, physical and mental health, dignity and freedom from cruel treatment, and participation in cultural life. Nonetheless, this research found that asylum seekers tend to have 'nothing to do'. The tendency for Australia's asylum seeker policies to be harming, contributing to harming situations, with asylum seekers' experiences lying predominantly in the suffering zone of the suffering-wellbeing continuum, provides a concrete example of how structural violence occurs. The Structural-Personal Interaction Process offers new insights into mechanisms through which status and policy structures contribute to situations that interact with asylum seekers personal attributes to shape their human experiences.