police’s investigation into the complaint said that the scars inflicted were the result of an accident. In another extreme case, a person detained at the Amygdaleza detention facility had been admitted to the hospital following an act of self-harm. According to CPT (2013), upon his return to the centre, he was handcuffed to the fence of his compound for a whole day without food. At night his co-detainees covered him with a blanket because it was cold. According to the Movement against Racism and Fascism (KEERFA, n.d.), on another occasion in the same centre, the police demanded the men stopped their hunger strike and when they refused, they were beaten up. Some of the men fainted but the police denied to call the doctors provocatively uttering ‘die if you don’t want to stop the hunger strike…you dirty scum go back to your countries’ (Flashnews.gr, 2013). The police response was sometimes even harsher when it came to women hunger strikers. In line with the discussion above, the representations of female irregular migrants as both inadequate women and the racialised embodiment of failing cultures were dominant (see also Bosworth et al., 2018; Volpp, 2000). This justified their maltreatment, for as a female detention officer at Petrou Ralli told me ‘They are sly, not as women from these countries, [but] as women in gender’ (Interview, Petrou Ralli detention centre, 2011). The best way of managing them, another officer made clear, was, therefore to be firm. ‘When they resist, I shout at them and they stop’, Xenia asserted (Interview, Petrou Ralli detention centre 2011). Sometimes, though, they did not stop. At the end of October 2015, women detained at the detention facility of Elliniko (now closed), decided to abstain from food protesting against detention conditions and the duration of their stay. In May of the same year, they had started another hunger strike but officials from the Ministry who visited them, reassured them that they would bring changes to detention law and that they would be released soon. Following an intimidation campaign by the police, which included deporting some of the women who were involved and asking them to sign a paper in Greek about their will to abstain, implying that those involved would face repercussions, they backed down. Apart from two, a woman from Iraq and Sanaa Taleb. While the former stopped after two days, Sanaa continued. Sanaa came from Morocco and had been arrested when leaving her job one night. 192