8 M. BOSWORTH ET AL. Downloaded by [94.66.124.78] at 01:32 30 November 2017 Chiora: Not there. They had somewhere else. Under the chairs and above the wheels like (pause) what is that (pause) like a coffin. And in reality I was there for 24 hours. At first, most of the women considered the border police to be part of their rescue following dangerous river and land crossings. As such, they even sought out security personnel to bring to an end their journey and the physical risks and pains they were enduring. They did not initially perceive the border police, in other words, as part of a coercive regime designed to repel their journey or to disrupt and deter the chains of facilitators that brought them to the border. Instead, they considered them to be people who would bring their physical risks to an end. It was only once women succeeded in their clandestine entry that their views of the police began to change. Few women understood the legal arrangements governing their stay in Greece. Only some had previously heard of the white paper12 notice for 30 days that is distributed at the border. It was with some surprise then, that they discovered that the Greek police were not figures of rescue, but rather personnel who would deport them. Despite their putative humanitarian role, they could not be called upon for assistance, even by those women who had experienced criminal victimisation (Aas and Gundhus 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2015; Williams 2015). To understand this gap, we turn next to the officers’ views of women migrants. Race, gender and border control Unlike the nuanced accounts the women provided about their motivations for crossing borders and the ways they journeyed, the border police overwhelmingly made sense of irregular migrants and their decision-making in simplistic, binary terms of race and gender. The detainees, in their view, were both inadequate women and the racialised embodiment of failing cultures. The dynamics of border control and irregular migration was conveniently washed aside in staff testimonies by energetic and dogmatic claims about the women's naivety and their criminal, sexually deviant and sub-human nature. For some officers, the women had simply been exploited.13 They get fooled. Before they arrive here they are told that they are going to work in houses and such and they end up on the street. They don't know what they are doing and where they are going. Women don't have an idea. (Ivan) The criminality of women, in this view, sprang from their inherent gullibility. Like children, they merely did what men told them to do. The best way of managing them, one officer made clear, was, therefore to be firm. ‘When they resist, I shout at them and they stop’, Jacinta asserted. Although this same officer claimed that ‘women are more innocent’ than men, most of her colleagues perceived their charges in more negative terms as deviants and subhumans. As others have found elsewhere, female detainees were perceived through a racialised prism as morally and intellectually distinct from and inferior to (Greek) citizens (Angel-Ajani 2003b; Brennan 2004; Jiwani 2005; Kapur 2005; Scambler 2007). In this narrative, race and gender delegitimise women as transnational migrants, especially in the face of increasing border control. Often cast in nationalist terms (Bosworth 2017), this view of the detainees obscured the global inequalities, regional conflict or trauma that the women emphasised in their accounts of migration.