JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2017.1408459 Women and border policing at the edges of Europe Mary Boswortha, Andriani Filia and Sharon Pickeringb Professor of Criminology, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; bProfessor of Criminology, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia Downloaded by [94.66.124.78] at 01:32 30 November 2017 a ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY While states around the world have responded to mass mobility by increasing border policing, our knowledge of the daily reality of that form of policing remains limited. How migrant women are policed has been particularly neglected. The political and practical difficulty of examining the context, process and experience of border control practices appears often to be insurmountable. This article contributes to filling some of the gaps in our knowledge by drawing on ethnographic data collected over a 12-month period in Greek immigration detention centres from 2011 to 2012. In it we examine the experience of policing and irregular entry across the Greek Turkey border – an entry-point to Europe that is routinely regarded as being in crisis. As we will demonstrate, border policing at this site is capricious and unpredictable. It is also highly racialised and gendered. Received 18 November 2016 Accepted 16 November 2017 KEYWORDS Border policing; women migrants; Greece; race and gender; immigration detention; intersectionality Introduction As states around the world have responded to growing numbers of people on the move by tightening their borders, strategies of border policing have assumed significant policy and political weight (Angel-Ajani 2003a; Green and Grewcock 2002; Pickering 2004). Through the securitisation of land and maritime borders, governments have sought to deter and disrupt the unauthorised mobility of people, often at the expense of their human rights. In so doing, they have reshaped policing, borders and sovereignty and the ways groups are included and excluded at national borders (Angel-Ajani 2003a; Goldsmith and Sheptycki 2007; Melossi 2003; Pickering 2006; Weber 2006). Women and children now make up 60% of people on the move in Europe. However, we know little about the nature and ramifications of their experiences of crossing borders (although see Gerard 2014). What little we do know suggests that practices of border securitisation have created a more hostile and violent environment for women, leading to higher incidence of rape and sexual violence in militarised border zones (Carpenter 2006; Pickering 2011). Though scholars have speculated that women are less willing to play ‘cat and mouse’ with border policing agents or to make repeated attempts at crossing highly securitised borders (Richter, Taylor, and Yúnez-Naude 2007), women, particularly those who are seeking asylum, remain vulnerable (Crawley 1999; McKay 2003). CONTACT Andriani Fili andriani.fili@crim.ox.ac.uk © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group