Refugee Women and the Gendered Violence of Australia’s Extraterritorial Asylum Regime on Nauru

Abstract

This article examines the gendered harms of state refugee externalisation laws and policies using the case study of Australia’s extraterritorial asylum regime on Nauru. While the regime has been widely criticised, the particular carceral experiences and structural vulnerabilities of refugee women and girls have received limited attention in refugee law scholarship. Drawing on interviews with 10 refugee women, this article documents and conceptualises the abusive nature of the regime from a gender perspective: first in relation to the produced insecurity and sexual violence in immigration detention and temporary resettlement in Nauru; next, in relation to the gendered medicalisation of refugee bodies under the official medical evacuation processes for transferring refugees from Nauru to Australia for healthcare; and finally, in relation to the continued punitive legal limbo and produced deportability for refugee women once transferred to Australia who nonetheless remain subject to the legal exclusions under Australia’s “offshore” detention and processing regime. We argue that, rather than being incidental to its operation, gendered harms have become a defining feature of the structural violence of Australia’s deterrence framework and practices of refugee expulsion and exclusion.