“The mother seems to traumatize her child”: examining empathy, denial, and responsibility in day-to-day encounters of families and staff in immigration detention in Canada

Abstract

This paper examines encounters of mothers and their children with detention facility staff during our fieldwork in immigration detention centres in Canada. We sought to understand how detainees and institutional staff understand each other and their roles within the broader system. Using a critical ethnographic frame that views the inner psychic worlds of subjects as contingent upon larger systems of power and oppression we organize our data around narrative and content themes. Our findings suggest that guards and staff see their roles as protectors of children, even as they communicate implicitly that these families are risks. Further, we propose that staff tend to project the aggressor onto the Other, in this case, migrant mothers, as a way to cope with the moral distress of witnessing the suffering of detained children, and with the burden of potential complicity. By describing how empathy, denial and responsibility are negotiated in these custodial spaces, we analyze the ways these micropolitical encounters can illuminate larger trends in the representation and reception of migrants with important implications for mental health care and border control practices and policy more broadly.