doi:10.

1093/bjc/azaa026 BRIT. J. CRIMINOL

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
BENEVOLENT POLICING? VULNERABILITY AND THE MORAL
PAINS OF BORDER CONTROLS
Ana Aliverti* 

In the United Kingdom, as in other jurisdictions, the language of vulnerability and ‘safeguarding’,
protection and care is becoming increasingly prevalent, often dovetailing with punitive rationales
and practices. Drawing from empirical material collected during a study on police–immigration
partnership in everyday policing, the paper analyses how contemporaneous punitive and humani-
tarian turns in criminal justice are experienced by law enforcement officers doing border work on
the ground and considers what implications these have. To what extent does the impetus to protect
and care bolster or complicate the exercise of state coercive powers? And what challenges and ten-
sions does it evince? It argues for a more nuanced understanding of the moral pain of border work
and its disruptive potentials.
Key Words:  policing, vulnerability, border controls, humanitarianism, moral pain.

Introduction
At the turn of the century, the ‘punitive turn’ in criminal justice—apparent in the readi-
ness of legislatures to use criminal statutes to regulate social life (overcriminalization),
the popularity in ‘zero tolerance’ policing, the increase of sentencing tariffs and the
enlargement of prison populations—dominated discussions in criminology (Garland
2001; Harcourt 2001; Husak 2008; Lacey 2008; Melossi et  al. 2017; Fassin 2018). The
ease with which criminal justice operators exert state-sanctioned pain has been linked
to concomitant cultural changes in the way societies perceive offenders and respond
to crime. Such policies have taken stock of racialized and xenophobic sensibilities and
propelled ‘hostile solidarities’ (Carvalho and Chamberlen 2018) by singling out sources
of threat and danger: from foreign criminals and terrorists to sex predators (Zedner
2009; Pratt et al. 2011). Despite decrease in crime rates and renewed calls for moder-
ation (Loader 2010), this ‘punitive turn’ remains unabated and emerges as one of the
distinctive features of our times.
While such diagnosis is accurate, the focus on punitiveness has often obscured other
facets of contemporary criminal justice policies that have received comparatively less at-
tention. This paper aims to unearth and explore one of them: the rise of vulnerability.
In the United Kingdom, as in other jurisdictions, the language of vulnerability and
‘safeguarding’ is becoming increasingly prevalent in criminal justice policies. While
concerns about suffering and vulnerability have often been expressed in relation to
crime victims (Walklate 2011), sometimes reinforcing a punitive response towards per-
petrators, attention in criminal justice policy started to focus on the suffering and needy
offender (Hannah-Moffat 2005). Underlying this new emphasis in focus is a conception

*Ana Aliverti, School of Law, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK; [email protected].

Page 1 of 19
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD).
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]
 ALIVERTI

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
of offending not through the lens of guilt and blame but as a human response to disad-
vantage and injustice (see e.g. National Crime Agency 2019: 3). In this reformulation,
the distinction between victims and perpetrators blurs, unsettling and complicating
binary criminal justice categories. A prime manifestation of such emphasis is the rise of
exploitation as an object of criminalization and a priority for law enforcement agencies
(Hadjimatheou and Lynch 2016; Collins 2017).
This paper is less interested in highlighting competing and contradictory trends and
rationales for state coercion. After all, as sociologists of punishment (Garland 1996;
O’Malley 1999) argued, criminal justice policies are driven by highly volatile, contra-
dictory and incoherent aims. Rather, it analyses how these contemporaneous punitive
and humanitarian turns in criminal justice are experienced by law enforcement officers
on the ground. In particular, it enquires: what are the implications of injecting com-
passion and empathy into policing? And what challenges and tensions does it evince?
Situating the emergence of vulnerability in UK law enforcement within a global
framework, the paper teases out its significance and implications for frontline in the
context of migration policing. The recent policy concern with labour and sexual ex-
ploitation revealed a widespread economy of illegality that thrives in the context of a de-
regulated labour market and restrictive immigration policies. This paper will first chart
the rise of vulnerability in public policy, exploring its main drivers and implications.
The second section turns to academic discussions on the notion of ‘vulnerability’, its
advocates and critics and connects such literature to Didier Fassin’s work on ‘humani-
tarian governance’ (Fassin 2012). As he argued, humanitarianism has become a per-
vasive rationality to frame and respond to a diverse range of situations and govern the
global poor. The main section of the paper explores how different and sometimes con-
flicting rationalities for enforcement and coercion play out on the ground by attending
to frontline staff’s perspectives and policing practices. This new focus has demanded
a major mindset change to the way law enforcement officers work and think. As they
are tasked with arresting and prosecuting or removing offenders, and at the same time
safeguarding and rescuing vulnerable individuals, their stance towards the population
they police often oscillates between suspicion and compassion. This section will ex-
plore the attendant moral tensions and dilemmas facing officers involved in exercising
state coercion. Actors can and do mediate policy processes by reflectively adopting,
negotiating, questioning or rejecting policy mandates. In the conclusion, I reflect on
the value of capturing these accounts for exposing the moral pains of border work and
assessing opportunities for resistance to punitivism from within.

The Rise of Vulnerability in Policing

In recent decades, a thriving industry profiteering from the social and legal precarity
of migrants has flourished in many urban areas to serve a growing demand for a range
of services: from hand car washes, agricultural and food industries and nail bars to
cannabis ‘factories’ and sex work (Cruz 2013; Clark and Colling 2018; Davies 2019).
In response, since the 2010s, in the United Kingdom, a variety of laws and policies
focused on criminal exploitation and the protection of vulnerable individuals in the
criminal justice system (Gadd and Broad 2018), particularly in the context of labour
and sexual violence. In 2015, the UK Parliament passed a flagship Act to tackle some of
Page 2 of 19
 VULNERABILITY AND THE MORAL PAINS OF BORDER CONTROLS

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
its most serious manifestations. Branded as the Modern Slavery (MS) Act 2015,1 this law
symbolically upgraded these crimes (slavery, servitude and forced labour and human
trafficking), made them a key strategic priority for law enforcement agencies around
the country and inspired new templates in policing and criminal investigations. The
MS Act, in section 45, created a new defence for individuals who commit an offence
under compulsion or coercion due to exploitation akin to the common law defence
of duress. Law enforcement agents and prosecutors should remain alert to indicators
of trafficking and slavery to consider whether to pursue enforcement action or a pros-
ecution against a person who might be a slavery or trafficking victim and to avoid their
criminalization.2 Frontline staff are increasingly bound by a more general duty of care
and safeguarding obligations as recognition is growing among practitioners and pol-
icymakers of the significance and implications of vulnerabilities in the criminal justice
system (Cooper and Norton 2017).
Concerns about vulnerability are of course not new. People drawn to the criminal
justice system have historically been the most socially and economically disadvantaged
sectors in society, attracting a wide range of philanthropists and religious institutions
to provide care and support and to divert the poor away from crime through a mixture
of curative and repressive tools (Platt 1969). Originally delivered by religious organ-
izations, the institution of probation was founded on the principle of rehabilitation
and embraced a vision of offenders as socially situated human beings and amenable
to reform through advice and assistance. Its creation in England in the late 19th cen-
tury pioneered a new conception and methods for the treatment of offenders and it
was an important milestone in the process of ‘civilizing punishment’ (Whitehead and
Statham 2006). As penal welfarism was progressively embedded within the criminal
justice system, practitioners have been required to accommodate safeguarding and re-
habilitation with public safety considerations.
Yet, in the last decade, the language of vulnerability and safeguarding has surfaced
with particular strength and in a distinctive way. The identification of vulnerabilities has
been institutionalized as an aspect of the work of criminal justice employees, including
the police, becoming a central performance measure of their work and instigating a
new field of research (Asquith et al. 2017; Dehaghani 2019). The rise of vulnerability in
policing reflects changes in demands, such as the shift from volume crime to more com-
plex forms of offending (Menichelli 2019: 9) and has been boosted by the government’s
response to high profile cases of child sexual exploitation (Her Majesty Government
2018: 13). While the working definition of ‘vulnerability’ is elusive and varies across
agencies (Keay and Kirby 2017; Enang et al. 2019), it is indicative of an individual condi-
tion that enhances the risk of harm and is produced by personal (such as mental health)
and situational factors (i.e. poverty); it activates a duty of care and requires specialized
support. In 2016, the then Home Secretary announced £1.9 million funding for the
College of Policing to train the new police leaders on vulnerability and to develop a new
qualification so that ‘the skills required to protect the vulnerable are every bit as valued

1
The MS Act 2015 was debated simultaneously with the Immigration Act 2014, which introduced a range of measures to crim-
inalize illegal working and prevent illegal migrants from accessing public and private services. Interestingly, the former was
repeatedly framed as the ‘humanitarian bill’ to protect genuine vulnerable victims and contraposed to the latter, which was
aimed at tackling immigration abuse.
2
Under Article 26 of the Council of Europe Anti-Trafficking Convention and Article 8 of EU Anti-Trafficking Directive
2011/36/EU.

Page 3 of 19
 ALIVERTI

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
and critical as those required of an authorized firearms officer or any other specially
trained officer’ (Rudd 2016). The college has prepared a range of training packages to
acquaint police officers on how to identify, protect and support vulnerable individuals by
‘looking beyond the obvious’ and empower them to use ‘professional curiosity’ (College
of Policing 2017b). In so doing, it supports ‘a cultural change’ in policing, which priori-
tizes safeguarding and public protective services (College of Policing 2017a). How police
forces deal with vulnerability is now a key performance indicator of their effectiveness
(Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary 2015).
The vulnerability agenda has extended beyond police services as public protection
and crime prevention is shared by a multitude of public and private agencies. Despite
its public mission statement, Immigration Enforcement (IE) has annexed safeguarding
vulnerable people to reducing illegal migration and deporting foreign national of-
fenders, its institutional raison d’être. The existence of the immigration agency in its
different institutional incarnations (first the Immigration and Nationality Directorate
and UK Border Agency and, now, downsized as IE) have been marred in a number of
public scandals in its dealing with foreign national prisoners and the tactics to reduce
undocumented resident populations (Jones et al. 2017). Branded the ‘hostile environ-
ment’ policies, a range of restrictions were sanctioned to detect and send out undocu-
mented migrants creating duties upon employers, bank employees, teachers, doctors
and others to report on them (Aliverti 2015). The zeal of the policy goal to reduce net
migration to the United Kingdom was said to be behind the wrongful repatriation of a
substantial number of UK citizens of Caribbean heritage, later known as the Windrush
scandal (Gentleman 2019). The illegal curtailment of residence rights to individuals,
some of them frail, elderly and suffering from serious illnesses, compounded questions
about the moral compass of the department and triggered a soul-searching exercise
within IE. The then Home Secretary Amber Rudd lost her job over the scandal and
her successor, Sajid Javid, promised to make the department fairer and more compas-
sionate.3 One of the inspections by its watchdog, the ICIBI, recommended its managers
to provide for a more humane and compassionate service: ‘How well the Home Office’s
Borders, Immigration and Citizenship System (BICS) recognizes and responds to the
needs of vulnerable individuals is a test not just of its competence but also of its cap-
acity for compassion, both of which have been questioned in recent months’ (Bolt 2019,
2). The mainstreaming of vulnerability, not just within asylum policymaking and case
working (Smith and Waite 2019) but at the core of its enforcement arm, speaks of its
powerful rhetorical force and suggests profound changes at the heart of the state.

From Vulnerability to Humanitarian Governance

The proliferation of concerns about vulnerability in public policy, as well as its
operationalization in practice, has been criticized by academics as a shallow attempt
to achieve social justice and equality at best and, at worst, as a tool to legitimize prob-
lematic practices and appease critique. Its purchase in contemporary criminal justice
policy, some argued, lies on its amorphous content and malleable contours, and its be-
nign facade enabling the legitimation of myriad, and often contradictory, policy goals.
3
In an exercise in rebranding, IE scrapped all references to ‘hostile environment’ and replaced them by the ‘compliant
environment’.

Page 4 of 19
 VULNERABILITY AND THE MORAL PAINS OF BORDER CONTROLS

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
The dialectic of vulnerability necessitates the hyper-representation of victims and vil-
lains, thus heightening punitive responses to a range of issues. By pitting states, nations
and individuals against rapacious and exploitative others, criminalization decisions
from anti-social behaviour orders and counter-terrorism measures (Ramsay 2012) to
anti-trafficking and prostitution policies (FitzGerald 2012; Munro and Scoular 2013)
become framed in terms of protection from vulnerability to harm (Harcourt 1999). So
too, criminologists noted that the ‘soft power of kindness’ (Canning 2019: 6) renders
violence and coercion palatable (Barker 2017) and enables the operation of state power
even beyond its territorial limits under the guise of humanitarian intervention (Aas
and Gundhus 2015; Bosworth 2017).
Vulnerability is loaded with associations of fragility, weakness, non-agency and fem-
ininity. Feminist scholars warned about the reliance on vulnerability in sexual violence
policies to justify protectionist interventions that are at odds with the respect for sexual
autonomy (Munro 2017). Instead of achieving formal and substantive equality for dis-
advantaged groups, it perpetuates gender, sexual and racial inequalities by making
its promises of protection conditional upon individuals fitting specific social roles or
stereotypes (Gilson 2016). At the same time, the focus on individual vulnerability may
overlook the complex intersections of structural and situational factors leading to sus-
ceptibility to abuse (Paasche et al. 2018) and works to negate state responsibilities to
provide universal, rather than targeted, care (Hannah-Moffat 2005: 42). As Vanessa
Munro argued, decisions about who counts as vulnerable and what situations constitute
an abuse of that vulnerability are embedded within power relations, thus ‘[u]npicking
these “politics of vulnerability” also requires interrogation of the socio-political con-
texts in which the concept is invoked, the motives underlying its invocation, the power
interests at stake and its concrete effects’ (Munro 2017: 430). These authors argued
that its policy translation has eroded the critical edge of the concept, one that has been
embraced by feminist philosophers to question liberal subjectivity as disembodied and
asocial (Fineman 2008).
In interrogating assumptions in liberal philosophy about consent and autonomy,
Judith Butler offers an understanding of vulnerability and precariousness as an intri-
cate aspect of human existence, of being in the world with others and of embodiment
(Butler 2004). As she explains, our ‘very survival depends not on the policing of a
boundary—the strategy of a certain sovereign in relation to its territory—but on recog-
nizing how we are bound up with others’ (Butler 2016: 52). Vulnerability emerges from
sociability and indicates conditions of physical dependency on one another. We are,
therefore, required to take moral stock of such bonds and interdependence; we are eth-
ically implicated and responsible for others’ lives. Although shared, vulnerability and
precarity are unevenly distributed which accounts for the disproportionate exposure to
risks of certain groups. Such geographical distribution of corporeal precarity is main-
tained through violence (Butler et  al. 2016: 4). Butler’s reflections on vulnerability,
precarity and power directly engage with issues of political violence, particularly recent
imperial wars waged by the United States across the world. In her view, war disavows
our shared precariousness and global interconnectedness, and our responsibility to
protect by dividing the world into those whose lives are worth defending and grieving
and those whose lives are disposable, invisible and forgettable. Wars and other nation-
alist endeavours help shape ‘frames of recognizability’ by reinforcing identification
with our fellow citizens and circumscribing our moral responsibility to those within
Page 5 of 19
 ALIVERTI

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
communities of belonging based on national ties (Butler 2016: 36). Yet, these frames of
recognizability are not entirely firm. As the accounts of frontline staff evince, closeness
to human fragility and suffering can perforate these frames, revealing a more compli-
cated moral landscape and casting doubts on their border control role.
This conception of vulnerability as a common human condition and moral impera-
tive for action has historically foregrounded humanitarian work. Humanitarianism as a
movement whose modern origins have been traced back to anti-slavery struggles by re-
ligious and grassroots organizations in the early 19th century galvanized ‘a uneven and
imperfect “moral globalization“ that gradually [gave] more people the tools to engage
with distant issues and with the fate of distant strangers’ (Stamatov 2013: 189). Through
its founding principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality, hu-
manitarianism expressed cosmopolitan ethics of care (Barnett and Weiss 2015: 3).
Under contemporary conditions, global interconnectivity and dependency, laid bared
by environmental, political and financial catastrophes, as well as growing global wealth
polarization and inequality, have ignited anew humanitarian efforts to alleviate human
suffering. As humanitarianism has been colonized by state and supra-states, it has aban-
doned its radical foundations and surpassed its humble remit of saving lives (Maxwell
and Gelsdorf 2019: 7).
Humanitarian discourse and logic have become a form of governance—‘humanitarian
governance’ (Barnett 2013). Fassin defines it as ‘the deployment of moral sentiments
in contemporary politics… to manage, regulate, and support the existence of human
beings’ (Fassin 2012: 1). As a politics of compassion, he explains, humanitarian govern-
ance operates at various levels (domestic and transnational), deployed by various actors
(state, non-state and supra-state organizations) and oriented to address the social
question. Fassin argues that the emergence of this form of power is born out as ‘a re-
sponse made by our societies to what is intolerable about the state of the contemporary
world’ (Fassin 2012, 252) and relieves us from the ‘burden of this unequal world order’.
Humanitarian governance, he argues, encapsulates the contradictions familiar to hu-
manitarianism since it is inspired by solidarity for others as fellows, although structured
around power inequalities between the giver and recipient of aid. This tension in rela-
tionships of domination and assistance underscores the constant oscillation between
compassion and repression that underpins the operation of humanitarian governance
(Fassin 2005).
The prominence of concerns with vulnerability in domestic public policies may be
conceived as an expression of humanitarian governance in so far as it signals a shift in
the state’s governance of the disadvantaged from the force of ‘iron fist’ (Auyero and de
Lara 2012) to the ‘warmth of the heart’. It inscribes compassion for human suffering
and an ethic of care into domestic policies, yet recalibrated to accommodate neoliberal
logics and demands. This ‘neoliberal humanitarian morality’ (Sözer 2019) is organized
around selective and partial assistance and is aimed at transforming vulnerable into
resilience subjects (Turner 2019: 3).
The notion of ‘humanitarian governance’ helps us appreciate important trans-
formations in rationalities underpinning the operation of state power and the moral
tensions and dilemmas facing frontline staff in the governance of the poor under con-
temporary conditions. The foregoing discussion reminds us of the pitfalls of mobilizing
the state’s pastoral power, yet it also speaks of the disruptive, even subversive, potential
that the language of vulnerability may engender. In the next section, I investigate how
Page 6 of 19
 VULNERABILITY AND THE MORAL PAINS OF BORDER CONTROLS

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
law enforcement officers tasked with migration control functions navigate the tensions
and conflicting demands for compassion and order, what their accounts tell us about
how state power operates and how it is enabled or thwarted through humanitarianism.
In exploring officers’ experiences and beliefs, the focus is less upon criticizing hu-
manitarian governance’s logics and rationales than in understanding its effects and
implications.

Policing Vulnerabilities, Humanizing Law Enforcement?

Methodology
In recent years, concerns over cross-border crime and the improper identification
of crime suspects and a growing appetite to pursue deportations against foreign of-
fenders, instead of criminal prosecutions, have instigated various forms of institutional
cooperation between the police and IE (Aliverti 2020). While partnership work has
been predominantly fostered by crime prevention objectives, the involvement of IE in
everyday policing is increasingly called forth to identify and safeguard vulnerable indi-
viduals—from crime victims and lone migrant children to rough sleepers and people
seeking asylum. In this section, I draw from empirical data obtained during a project
that investigates police and immigration cooperation in everyday policing in two major
UK police forces and the respective Immigration Compliance and Enforcement (ICE)
teams. The project charted different forms of cooperation to understand the drivers,
nature and implications of interagency work.
It is based on data collected during a period of ethnographic research within these
institutions between 2017 and 2019. The data derives from approximately 1,000 hours
of non-participant observations of enforcement operations, custody processes, training
sessions, case management work and police–immigration officials’ interactions at a dis-
tance from control rooms (equivalent to 3 days per week during an 18-months period).
The project was divided into two stages: the first stage was devoted to observing cus-
tody processes (including police and immigration interviews and custody bookings)
in custody cells with embedded immigration officers and shadowing these officers
throughout their daily shifts for 16 weeks. In the second stage, observations focused
on operational joint work between immigration and police officers. I accompanied im-
migration and police staff during pre-arranged intelligence-led visits. On average, I at-
tended operational visits once in a fortnight during a period of 12 months. Most of the
visits observed involved multi-partnership work, which included the police, Her Majesty
Revenue and Customs, housing standards and fire and rescue services, among others,
and were led by ICE staff. In addition, I observed the daily working routines, meetings
and training sessions of police and immigration officers. This involved the systematic
criminal and immigration status checks and referral assessment of cases and training
inputs to various police and non-police staff on immigration powers. Observations were
collated through extensive, reflexive fieldnotes after each shift. They capture some of
these interactions and informal conversations I had with staff as faithfully as possible
(when possible, I reproduce them verbatim) and my reflections on them.
Additionally, I  conducted 100 in-depth semi-structured interviews with police and
immigration employees at different ranks and with various responsibilities. Interviews
lasted for approximately 45 minutes on average and explored officers’ backgrounds and
Page 7 of 19
 ALIVERTI

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
perceptions of their role, as well as experience of multiagency work. Interview record-
ings and fieldwork notes were subsequently transcribed and coded together, through
NVivo, to identify common themes and connections. When reproducing interviews
and fieldnotes, participants are identified by their institutional affiliation, rank and
pseudonyms to ensure their anonymity. Likewise, the sites where I conducted observa-
tions are not identified to protect the anonymity of participants.
This section examines how police and immigration staff navigate the competing
policy demands for protection and repression in the policing of migration. These pol-
icies are mediated, altered, contested and negotiated by state agents in their implemen-
tation. They are ‘interpretative actors in their own right’, whose accounts and actions
can reveal ‘the intermissions and tensions between rationalities and actions, discourse
and practice’ (Côté-Boucher et al. 2014: 199). State agents do not just implement pol-
icies, they make them. By zooming in their experiences and values, we can study the
state from the bottom up and grasp its ‘heart’ (Fassin 2015: 2; Zacka 2017: 18). As the in-
stitutional moral milieu of policing shifts, the implementation of policies and rules are
highly determined by values and judgements of individual officers (Lipsky 2010: 15). As
I show below, the ‘humanitarian turn’ in policing has been responded to differently by
officers according to their perceptions and beliefs about their jobs and the people they
are meant to police. In describing the new moral climate of policing, they also reveal
the moral pains of border work.

Vulnerability dialectics: fuzzy contours and confusing demands

Vulnerability’s fuzzy boundaries, ambiguity and pliability are critical in understanding
the relative lack of resistance to its mainstreaming in policing. Its multiple signi-
fiers enable the swift adaptation to different and contrasting policy goals, sometimes
disrupting the premises on which border controls operate, others reaffirming them. Its
fuzzy boundaries might also be the reason why it is preferred to the notion of humani-
tarianism, which is seldom evoked. Vulnerability is a matter of perspective, sergeant
John reckons: ‘whereas for one officer a young person with a crack addiction might be
vulnerable, for another he will just be a crack dealer and criminal’ (fieldwork notes).
Discerning victims from villains and deciding how to respond depends on officers’
moral dispositions and orientations. Felicity, an immigration officer (IO), recounts her
own dialectics of vulnerability: ‘They are getting lots and lots of money that is getting
sucked out of the government just because they are abusing the system, they have got no
right of entitlement, they have got nothing… It is not just people who are committing
criminal offences you have got people who are from foreign countries’ (immigration
interview). In discussing the harms of illegal immigration, she portrays the nation as
vulnerable to abuse and, in doing so, bestows her job with a moral mandate to protect
it. Her account echoes a shift in institutional discourse framing illegal migration not
only as a regulatory breach but as wrongful and harmful (Aliverti 2013, 2017).
For Becky, vulnerability takes a more concrete shape. As a detective in a sexual of-
fences team, she learnt that domestic violence victims often refuse to testify against their
abusers and are left unprotected. Mimicking a reassuring conversation with a hypothet-
ical woman, she explains how the border can offer her protection when the criminal
justice fails: ‘we are going to solve this problem for you, we are going to stop you getting
Page 8 of 19
 VULNERABILITY AND THE MORAL PAINS OF BORDER CONTROLS

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
beaten up every night of the week because we are going to take some positive action and
immigration are going to remove him’ (police interview). Sarah, who has worked in a
local ICE team for almost two decades and is now an inspector, regards the protection of
IE’s ‘clientele’ as being at the centre of her job: ‘We are a law enforcement agency so you
know, we are here to enforce the immigration laws, um, so yeah, part of protection, sort
of protecting people as well. Not just protecting those people that are being exploited or
are being trafficked or… You know we have vulnerable people walk in here downstairs
[in the reporting centre]’ (immigration interview). Working with IE, Police constable
(PC) Frank asserts, is not just about enforcement. In his role as offender manager whose
task is to divert people away from crime, he comes across many destitute and homeless
foreigners who are keen on ‘going back’ and IE ‘can facilitate that’ (fieldwork notes).
Such job description resonates with a presentation made by the head of an immigra-
tion crime unit tasked with investigating human smuggling networks. Aided by a slide
showing a photo of a woman holding her toddler daughter in the back of a converted
van crammed with men, he made a punchy introduction to an audience of police and
immigration officers: ‘this is why I do this job: to save lives’ (fieldwork notes). On these
accounts, immigration controls are meant to stop people from being abused by keeping
them or their abusers out of the United Kingdom, and as a tool to interrupt the vicious
cycle of ‘illegality’ by encouraging them to ‘move homes’. In doing so, they not only
reassert the multiple logics that the border serves (Walters 2011; Barker 2017) but also
inscribe it at the centre of everyday policing.
The ‘humanitarian turn’ adds a new set of demands to a workforce that has been
trained to detain and remove and generally regards it with perplexity and confusion.
Lesley started her career as an IO, climbed the ranks and now works in a unit respon-
sible for ‘mainstreaming’ vulnerability in IE. When she joined the Home Office, it was
all about kicking in doors and arresting people, ‘and you don’t necessarily see that
human person in front of you’. She is well aware that she faces an uphill task ahead in
changing the ‘target culture’ and that IE’s ‘new hat’ will complicate even further its or-
ganizational identity:
I think we have always had this issue in Immigration Enforcement of who we are, we have always had
a huge identity problem, are we soft and fluffy? Do we safeguard? Or are we there to actually tackle
immigration abuse?… I think it is really difficult to combine erm a job where we’re protecting people
and a job where actually we are protecting the community (immigration interview).

Her police colleagues agree, airing their concerns about engaging with immigration
staff for identifying and supporting victims of exploitation. ‘I think they [IE] have got
problems in fact they are getting beaten with a stick by the government to have their
figures of how many people to remove and I think that clashes a little bit with our victim
care side, that worries me a little bit’, Tim, a detective with a specialization on modern
slavery, confessed (police interview). Close cooperation between the police and immi-
gration has heightened concerns that personal data on crime victims was being passed
on to IE, placing those with precarious migration status at risk of removal.4 Softening
its profile and rebranding IE through e.g. posters featuring a mosaic of human faces
4
Following a super complaint requesting regional police forces, their policies in sharing information on victims with IE,
National Police Chiefs Council guidelines were published setting out minimum standards about data sharing: https://www.gov.
uk/government/publications/police-data-sharing-for-immigration-purposes-a-super-complaint and https://assets.publishing.
service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/767718/Appendix_1.pdf, respectively.

Page 9 of 19
 ALIVERTI

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
that read ‘you can’t always see where someone is vulnerable’ and advising partners to
contact IE has in part sought to contain the reputational risk of recent scandals and
reassure partners. While the institutional change of heart might have been driven by
instrumental reasons and even though its operationalization might seem cosmetic, its
reverberations on the ground are profound.

Moral discomfort: when compassion gets in the way

Officers have responded in different ways to the new demands. For some, the ‘hu-
manitarian turn’ has complicated moral dilemmas about their work. Many immigra-
tion officers joined the force to arrest and deport murderers and rapists and feel less
comfortable about pursuing people without the right papers or protecting vulnerable
people—a job that some of them feel they are not trained to do. ‘I am interested in
criminality, so where immigration meets criminality’ IO Jane explains confidently:
I don’t necessarily agree with all of our immigration policies and the way that we go about them, erm
so looking at criminality I think that is quite clear cut for me. It was a moral decision… We’re not
geared up at dealing with victims, we don’t look at people as victims, we look at people as offenders
and that… we’re an enforcement organization so that makes sense (immigration interview).

‘Straightforward immigration work’ is morally more complicated and troubling: it is

about piercing the ‘moral fog’ of immigration lawbreaking (Fischer 2012: 476)  and
deciding who deserves to stay and who needs to go. Like Jane, many of her colleagues
find tackling ‘real criminals’ to be the most rewarding part of their job because it is clear
cut, does not pose moral dilemmas and is less politically contentious. Mike, a chief IO,
told me he sometimes feels ‘embarrassed’ about his job and does not disclose where he
works beyond his inner circle: ‘I feel sorry for a lot of the people that we deal with. A lot
of them are vulnerable and want a better life. So I find it quite difficult at times. In some
ways, it goes against what I believe in but on the other hand… some of the work we’re
doing in tackling the criminality, that’s the part I find satisfying’ (immigration inter-
view). IO James dislikes dealing with families. As a father of a young child, he told me ‘I
find that quite upsetting and it’s not part of the job I particularly like… it’s quite difficult
to not be sympathetic to their circumstances…’. Revealing his own moral hierarchies,
he draws a line between ‘criminals’ and ‘immigration offenders’ and perceives enforce-
ment against the latter reluctantly as a matter of rule of law: ‘unfortunately if they’ve got
no permission to be in the UK, we have to sort of enforce that’ (immigration interview).
Similarly, police managers prefer immigration officers to focus on helping them to
deport criminals:
‘At a local level my job I think is to work with immigration units to make sure that they are able to
meet their targets… so if that means removing rapists and murderers from the country I am very, very
happy with that and that feels like a very good use of our time… [as long as] they don’t then go and
hang round outside homeless shelters or remove prostitutes from the streets and deport them’ (Phil,
police partnership lead, police interview).

After a visit to a family home where a babysitter from Latin America was reportedly
working without a visa, PC Justin confessed to me he did not like these cases and pre-
fers to deal with ‘the built-up guy who is involved in all sorts of things’: ‘They break my

Page 10 of 19
 VULNERABILITY AND THE MORAL PAINS OF BORDER CONTROLS

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
heart. As a father, I’d take her home. Bless her!’ The 18-year-old girl looked puzzled
when IO Janine informed her she was under arrest and would be taken to police cus-
tody. Complaining about a decision she perceived as ‘heartless’, Janine comments ‘for
god sake, it’s like detaining your daughter… bless her, she is so cute’. She was relieved
when the girl revealed she was taking medication for depression and asthma, which
she immediately reported to her boss to reverse the arrest decision: ‘She might have
given me the key to keep her here’ she sighed allayed. This episode reveals not only the
discomforts of border work (Franko and Gundhus 2019) but also the moral economy
of empathy and compassion. At the end of the visit, Janine and Justin concluded that
both the couple and the nanny were ‘legitimate’ and did not have the ‘attitude of guilty
people’; they had just fallen foul of the au pair placement company who did not conduct
the checks correctly. Comparing them to the ‘bread and butter’ illegal working case—
the local Chinese takeaway who hires people to work and live in the same premise—
Janine struggles to pin down factual differences (fieldwork notes). Yet, the class and
racial undertones were apparent and important for understanding the ‘politics of pity’
(Boltanski 1999) in policing. It illustrates how feelings of empathy are enabled and
constrained by ‘ideological constructions’ about nation, race and belonging (Heyman
2000: 644).
In contrast, for Mariel, an immigration inspector, the policy shift within her de-
partment is welcomed. She recalls working in the ‘family team’, which was tasked with
conducting enforcement visits in family homes, with pain and unease. As she starts ex-
plaining the team’s role, her voice breaks down:
(Mariel): When you’re dealing with families with young children, it can be really upsetting and all
of what those young children want to do is go to school or see their friends and then you’re there
saying ‘well actually, no’, and at the time we’re with these big burly police officers ‘and you’re going
in a van’ so…
(Ana): What did you think at the time when you were tasked with doing these jobs?
(Mariel): It is not a nice job, it is really not a nice job, I erm… when I became pregnant… erm… when
I had my children, I found it even more difficult erm I used to say to myself that I know that if I am
doing the job I do to my best ability and I do it… I go in with the intention of being as nice as I pos-
sibly can, it is a horrible job but it doesn’t mean you have to be a horrible person to do that job, erm
and I always had that mindset about me that if it is a job that needed to be done, but it could be done
in a better way, a nice way (immigration interview).

She found solace in the new orientation of her department, which pledged to reduce
the detention of children and to put the ‘person first’ in all stages of immigration
enforcement actions and decision-making. She is responsible for training her team
on ‘vulnerability’ and instructs them and police officers to keep an open mind when
dealing with people: ‘we just need to be that voice of conscious in the background just
saying “well actually have you considered that this person who is in a cannabis farm
might have been in a cannabis farm because of other circumstances, erm or have you
considered this child might be pickpocketing because of something else that is hap-
pening?”’ (immigration interview). The ‘vulnerability turn’ helped her find a moral
quality to her job ironing out moral dilemmas and, she hopes, will change the image
of a department seen by many as ‘heartless’. And, as it turns out, it also enabled to vent
the discomforts of doing border work. As Lesley recounts her experience of placing a
terminally ill man in detention, she relayed with some ambivalence that:
Page 11 of 19
 ALIVERTI

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
I don’t feel comfortable with a lot of things that I am doing because I think as a… I think your com-
passion sometimes gets in the way of it, but you have got a job to do and you think of those people,
every now and again and you think what happened to them. Erm… and it is that erm… I like my job,
I don’t mind doing it, I have no issue with doing it but I think you do need to stay aware of how you
do it… treat people with dignity and respect, treat them as you would expect somebody to treat your
sister or your grandma or your dad’ (immigration interview).

Moral ambivalence and stress, which are often unspoken or veiled during the everyday
work of these officers, are one of the reasons for the turnover in ICE staff, as IO Ted
reckons: ‘Some people can’t stay more than a year. This job is not for everyone: the
shifts, the detention of families, of children asylum seekers’ (fieldwork notes). While
discussing the emotional toll of policing (Lumsden and Black 2017: 610), these officers
lay bare moral tensions and ambivalences, which can not only open up opportunities
for contestation but also reaffirm the moral categories or hierarchies and assumptions
with which border work operates.

Ambivalence and impotence at the border

In a cold, damp winter morning, I accompanied officers to a makeshift hand car wash
at the verge of an industrial estate where workers were reported as being kept in unsafe
conditions and living and sleeping in a nearby stationary lorry. PC Rich and IO Ben
found a man washing the wheels of incoming cars. Upon some checks, they found that
he had been refused asylum and was not allowed to work but could not be returned to
Afghanistan. Another employee mentioned he was found sleeping in a park and had
been fed by the owner of the shop. ‘We don’t [want] people to come to England and
sleep on the street’, Rich explained to him. The officers asked him who gave him work,
and he explained that he did not get paid and that nobody came to offer him work. He
just came to do some work and his co-workers feed him: ‘They give me pizza’. In a more
assertive tone, he lucidly explained the paradox of the situation: ‘I need help, nobody
wants to help. You come here and say I shouldn’t live on the streets but you don’t help
me’. After asking ‘safeguarding questions’ and confirming he is not a modern slave, the
officers walked away (fieldwork notes). The mission of the visit was to ‘rescue modern
slaves’, yet they were unable to help a man caught up in the Kafkaesque asylum limbo
held hostage of a policy many officers find cruel and counterproductive.
Frontline staff are exposed every day to the social debris of economic restructuring,
climate emergencies and distant wars. Extreme abjection is encountered daily in the
suburbs of English metropoles, once home to factories, industries and market towns,
whose run-down buildings and repurposed townhouses remind passers-by of a dis-
tant glorious past. As IO Ann puts it, ‘we see and deal with modern-day slavery every
day, most of the immigration offenders that we encounter, the majority of them are
being exploited to some degree’ (immigration interview). While the constant repeti-
tion of misery and hopelessness hardens even the most sympathetic officers as a form
of emotional coping (Baillot et al. 2013; Papazoglou and Chopko 2017), some are still
reminded of their privilege amid global poverty. IO Hassan confided a conversation he
had many years ago with a man he arrested for illegal entry. He told him that, after his
father died and his family was left destitute, he came to the United Kingdom from the
same region of the world Hassan’s family once fled in Pakistan. ‘It could have been me’
Page 12 of 19
 VULNERABILITY AND THE MORAL PAINS OF BORDER CONTROLS

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
Hassan reflects on their common origins and different life chances. Being privy to the
drivers of migration, he tries to explain to his white colleagues why people come to the
United Kingdom to work in exploitative conditions: ‘Nobody jumps on a boat just for
fun… If you could go to another country and get to send some of your money back to
your family, wouldn’t you do it as well?’ (fieldwork notes).
His colleague Tabita, whose parents came from India, is also well aware of the ‘lot-
tery of birth’. As she fingerprints a man who arrived from Pakistan to claim asylum in
the United Kingdom, she conveys: ‘This is a great country. I love this country. People
tell me “you’re lucky to have been born here” but sometimes people abuse the system
here’. As we retreat from the busy police custody environment to have a cup of tea, she
tells me that the year before she was recruited by the Home Office to help dismantle
the Calais camp in Northern France. There was a call for an IO to get involved in this
and she volunteered to do it as her language skills were needed. Driving all over France,
she helped to identify people for resettlement in the United Kingdom. The journey, it
transpired, was fraught with contradictions as she tells me: ‘[as an IO] I am working
towards removing people and I was bringing them in’. She talked about how the ma-
jority of people brought were not from Syria and suggested ‘they took advantage’. Yet,
immediately after, as she broke into tears, she told me about a 10-year-old child and a
20-year-old Ethiopian man who was skinny and would not eat. She saw the suffering of
people and could not understand how a child could be there, enduring the conditions
of the camp. And then she told me about her anger at people, like the ones she encoun-
ters in police custody, who are given an opportunity to come to this country and yet
commit crimes. As much as she found the deployment to Calais morally rewarding, she
is also wary of being let down by the people she helped to come here ‘if they are found
to be terrorists’ (fieldwork notes).
Feelings of empathy and compassion, which are stirred up by physical closeness to
others’ suffering and common paths and identities, are mixed with suspicion and con-
cerns about order (Heyman 2002; Aas and Gundhus 2015: 9). This ambivalent stance
underpins individual and institutional responses to vulnerable migrants who are per-
ceived at the same time as ‘needy’ and ‘ just seeking a better life’ on the one hand and,
on the other, as potential abusers. Laying out the risks of becoming ‘soft and fluffy’,
Robert explains the fine balance his department has to straddle: ‘The tensions… the
wider tension for Immigration Enforcement is the need for us to be able to protect the
UK from illegal migration’ while identifying people in need of protection. His experi-
ence as a manager of a unit that specializes in serious immigration crimes reminds him
that policing the boundaries of vulnerabilities is challenging as people keep gaming
the system: ‘there are certain nationalities that would seem to erm declare that they
have been trafficked and exploited when they haven’t, just to get the immigration ad-
vantage so you have got to try and find that balance there’ (immigration interview).
Yet, maintaining such balance is profoundly complicated, ethically and practically,
in a world of deep inequalities. Sergeant Bill leads a team tasked with patrolling a de-
prived suburb home to an ethnically diverse population built through multiple layers
of migration waves since imperial times. Despite his many years of service, he is still
astonished at attending houses cramped, hazardous and filthy, where they cannot work
out who is who. People are becoming cannier at dealing with the police, he tells me.
As we headed to inspect a series of businesses alleged to hire workers without papers,
he mentioned in passing that a few days ago his team dismantled a ‘cannabis farm’
Page 13 of 19
 ALIVERTI

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
and arrested Vietnamese men ‘tending the plants’. Incredulous, he added: ‘We found
a manual with all the instruction in English of what they need to tell the police if they
are encountered: “I am a slave, I have been brought by a trafficker etc etc”’ (fieldwork
notes). As many officers relayed, often they leave sites not knowing what is happening
behind those walls and impotent to do their job.
As a detective specializing in modern slavery, Penny is familiar with those dilemmas.
She recalls an operation where her team dismantled a criminal network trafficking in
sex workers from Romania and keeping them under conditions of ‘modern slavery’. To
safeguard the sex workers and their families, they temporarily housed them in a refur-
bished hall within a church: ‘There was a Romanian lady, she must have been in her
50s and will never forget because sometimes it makes you question what you do, and she
is saying to me: “I have no windows in Romania, this man gives me a house and I have
windows… he is like family, he pays me money, now I  have nowhere to live… I  have
no money I need money, I need to work”’. Another woman told her that she came to
the United Kingdom for sex working for a few weeks at a time so she can earn enough
money to heat her house in Romania by buying logs for the whole winter. ‘And we think
we’re doing the noble thing and the right thing and helping them, but actually are
we? Because now we have had to send them in a minibus to the homeless [shelter] to
report [them] as homeless’ (police interview). Doing the ‘noble thing’ is fraught with
dilemmas as in exercising the state’s pastoral power by ‘rescuing victims’, she inadvert-
ently deprives them of their dignity and exacerbates their troubles.
Despite these dilemmas, Penny finds working in this area still rewarding because not
only are they helping ‘horrendously vulnerable people’ but also effecting a cultural
change in policing where the focus is still placed on catching criminals. Instead, her job
requires a different mindset, she explains, ‘you have to be prepared to think differently
about people’ and have ‘an open mind… you know it is not about catching baddies at
all and it is… it is about changing things for individuals, and that might just be getting
them safe it might not, if they don’t want you to, [mean to] arrest people sometimes’.
Despite confessing that she is sometimes not seen as a ‘real police officer’, Penny’s testi-
mony relays significant shifts in the moral landscape of policing.

Conclusion
Humanitarianism is not only enabling the operation of penal power beyond the terri-
torial limits of the Northern states (Bosworth 2017) but also increasingly legitimizing
its operation within its shores through appealing to the notion of vulnerability. Cynical
readings of the policy shifts outlined above as performative and instrumental to val-
idate problematic institutions and practices are warranted, particularly given the puni-
tiveness that has long characterized the politics of crime and immigration worldwide.
Notwithstanding its opportunistic policy drivers and its many pitfalls, the significance
of the ‘humanitarian turn’ should not be underestimated. I argued that it signals im-
portant moral dilemmas and tensions in producing social order at the heart of the
state. For once, it evinces the limitations of punitiveness as an organizing principle in
criminal justice and a growing demand to humanize state power.
In exploring these tensions, I have privileged the views of those tasked with enforcing
order, hired by institutions that regard public security as its primary objective, to shed

Page 14 of 19
 VULNERABILITY AND THE MORAL PAINS OF BORDER CONTROLS

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
light on the intricate ways in which the new impetus to protect and safeguard dovetails,
often uncomfortably, with security rationale and training. Such difficulties are evinced
by the uneven reception of the new ethos among officers and within institutional struc-
tures, including performance indicators. As doing ‘protection and safeguarding’ is per-
ceived to require specialized skills and dispositions that are outside the ordinary police
training, these roles are often occupied by women or outsourced to voluntary organiza-
tions (Tomczak and Thompson 2019) who also bear the emotional labour involved in
dealing with vulnerable individuals. Judged by its potential to unsettle police’s cultural
norms and the gender distribution of labour within policing (Holdaway and Parker
1998), the new policy might have limited impact.
Yet, the testimonies of officers reveal less tangible but equally significant, albeit un-
anticipated consequences of the ‘humanitarian turn’. While the data collected does not
allow to draw conclusions on the material implications of the policy on the treatment of
individuals subject to border controls, officers’ accounts and practices reveal how such
policy, given its elasticity and ambiguity, broadens their discretion and amplifies the
importance of individual officers’ moral dispositions on outcomes. While, for some, it
amounts to treat people with dignity and respect, others feel empowered to be more
drastic by prioritizing safeguarding and instructing the delay or cancelation of enforce-
ment action. Less tangible, however, are the implications of the ‘humanitarian turn’ on
officers’ interpretations of the moral dilemmas they face and their understanding of
their roles and responsibilities towards distant others. Their accounts and experiences
speak of the limitations of the vulnerability framework and the impotence they face
in mitigating human suffering. Yet, they also suggest that such a framework enables a
new moral economy in the policing of the global poor, the complexity of which is not
adequately captured by a sole focus on punitiveness.
Above all, they lay bare a less assertive image of the state and a more ambivalent
stance towards precarity and inequality. On the face of it, a more complex appreciation
of the lived social world is revealed, thus complicating the exercise of state power. As
their accounts illustrate, their everyday exposure to the scandal of gross global inequal-
ities strikes a nerve on their own fragility and encourages empathy—captured in the
recurrent references to family members when talking about distant others. For many,
such realizations are unbearable; for others, they are soothing. For all of them, humani-
tarianism is an opportunity to come to terms with their job and vent their critiques and
the moral pain of border work. In engaging with and interpreting policy demands, they
shed light on the negotiated nature of state power while revealing the altered moral
landscape of policing under conditions of globalization.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the immigration and police officers who agreed to be interviewed and
allowed me to shadow them through their shifts, as well as police and Immigration
Compliance and Enforcement managers for facilitating my research. I am also grateful
to Sanjeeb Hossain, Baohua Shao and Alice Gerlach for their research assistance.
Thanks to a number of colleagues who have engaged with the arguments put for-
ward in the paper and for their generosity in commenting various drafts of it. I  am
especially indebted to Henrique Carvalho, Anastasia Chamberlain, Lucia Zedner and

Page 15 of 19
 ALIVERTI

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
Vanessa Munro, to two anonymous reviewers for the British Journal of Criminology
and to participants at the Warwick Law School conference (Coventry, June 2019) and
the European Society of Criminology Annual Conference (Ghent, September 2019) for
questions, critiques and comments. The research I  conducted was enabled by the fi-
nancial support of the Leverhulme Trust through the Philip Leverhulme Prize in
Law [PLP-2017–170]; the Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration
Account [ESRCIAA2_004_2019] and various grants from the University of Warwick.

References
Aas, K. F. and Gundhus, H. (2015), ‘Policing Humanitarian Borderlands: Frontex, Human
Rights and the Precariousness of Life’, The British Journal of Criminology, 55: 1–18.
Aliverti,  A. (2013), Crimes of Mobility: Criminal Law and the Regulation of Immigration.
Routledge.
—— (2015), ‘Enlisting the Public in the Policing of Immigration’, The British Journal of
Criminology, 55: 215–30.
—— (2017), ‘The Wrongs of Unlawful Migration,’ Criminal Law and Philosophy 11: 375–91.
—— (2020), ‘Patrolling the ‘Thin Blue Line’ in a World in Motion: An Exploration of the
Crime—Migration Nexus in UK Policing’, Theoretical Criminology, 24: 8–27.
Asquith,  N., Bartkowiak-Théron,  I. and Roberts,  K. (eds) (2017), Policing Encounters With
Vulnerability. Palgrave.
Auyero, J. and de Lara, A. B. (2012), ‘In Harm’s Way at the Urban Margins’, Ethnography,
13: 531–57.
Baillot, H., Cowan, S. and Munro, V. E. (2013), ‘Second-Hand Emotion? Exploring the
Contagion and Impact of Trauma and Distress in the Asylum Law Context’, Journal of Law
and Society, 40: 509–40.
Barker, V. (2017), ‘Nordic Vagabonds: The Roma and the Logic of Benevolent Violence in
the Swedish Welfare State’, European Journal of Criminology, 14: 120–39.
Barnett, M. N. (2013), ‘Humanitarian Governance’, Annual Review of Political Science, 16:
379–98.
Barnett,  M. and Weiss,  T. (2015), Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics.
Cornell University Press.
Boltanski, L. (1999), Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge University
Press.
Bolt, D. (2019), An Inspection of the Home Office’s Approach to the Identification and Safeguarding
of Vulnerable Adults February – May 2018. ICIBI.
Bosworth,  M. (2017), ‘Penal Humanitarianism? Sovereign Power in an Era of Mass
Migration’, New Criminal Law Review, 20: 39–65.
Butler, J. (2004), Precarious Life. The Power of Mourning and Violence. Verso.
—— (2016), Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? Verso.
Butler, J., Gambetti, Z. and Sabsay, L. (2016), ‘Introduction’, in J. Butler, Z. Gambetti,
and L. Sabsay, eds, Vulnerability in Resistance, 1–11. Duke University Press.
Canning,  V. (2019), ‘Keeping up With the Kladdkaka: Kindness and Coercion in
Swedish Immigration Detention Centres’, European Journal of Criminology, 1–21. doi:
10.1177/1477370818820627.

Page 16 of 19
 VULNERABILITY AND THE MORAL PAINS OF BORDER CONTROLS

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
Carvalho, H. and Chamberlen, A. (2018), ‘Why Punishment Pleases: Punitive Feelings in
a World of Hostile Solidarity’, Punishment & Society, 20: 217–34.
Clark, I. and Colling, T. (2018), ‘Work in Britain’s Informal Economy: Learning from
Road-Side Hand Car Washes’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 56: 320–41.
College of Policing (2017a), ‘How Do You Respond to the Needs of Vulnerable People?’,
available online at https://www.college.police.uk/News/College-news/Pages/police_
transformation_fund.aspx. Last accessed 15 July 2019.
—— (2017b), ‘Vulnerability’, available online at https://www.college.police.uk/What-
we-do/Development/Vulnerability/Pages/Vulnerability.aspx. Last accessed 15 July 2019.
Collins, J. (2017), ‘Exploitation of Persons and the Limits of the Criminal Law’, Criminal
Law Review, 167–84.
Cooper,  P. and Norton,  H. (eds) (2017), Vulnerable People and the Criminal Justice System.
Oxford University Press.
Côté-Boucher, K., Infantino, F. and Salter, M. B. (2014), ‘Border Security as Practice:
An Agenda for Research’, Security Dialogue, 45: 195–208.
Cruz, K. (2013), ‘Unmanageable Work, (Un)liveable Lives: The UK Sex Industry, Labour
Rights and the Welfare State’, Social & Legal Studies, 22: 465–88.
Davies, J. (2019), ‘Corporate Harm and Embedded Labour Exploitation in Agri-Food Supply
Networks’, European Journal of Criminology, 17: 70–85. doi: 10.1177/1477370819874416.
Dehaghani, R. (2019), Vulnerability in Police Custody: Police Decision-Making and the Appropriate
Adult Safeguard. Routledge.
Enang, I., Murray, J., Dougall, N., Wooff, A., Heyman, I. and Aston, E. (2019), ‘Defining
and Assessing Vulnerability Within Law Enforcement and Public Health Organisations:
A Scoping Review’, Health & Justice, 7: 1–13.
Fassin,  D. (2005), ‘Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration
Policies in France’, Cultural Anthropology, 20: 362–87.
—— (2012), Humanitarian Reason. A  Moral History of the Present. University of California
Press.
—— (ed.) (2015), At the Heart of the State. The Moral World of Institutions. Pluto Press.
—— (2018), The Will to Punish. Oxford University Press.
Fineman, M. (2008), ‘The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition’,
Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 20: 1–23.
Fischer, N. (2012), ‘Protecting Minors, Controlling Migrants: The Emotional and Moral
Issues Involved in Hearings of Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors by Freedoms and
Detention Judges in France’, Revue Française de Sociologie, 53: 473–501.
Fitzgerald, S. A. (2012), ‘Vulnerable Bodies, Vulnerable Borders: Extraterritoriality and
Human Trafficking’, Feminist Legal Studies, 20: 227–44.
Franko,  K. and Gundhus,  H.  O.  I. (2019), ‘Moral Discomfort at the Border:
Understanding Penal Humanitarianism in Practice’, available online at https://www.
law.ox.ac.uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/
blog/2019/03/moral-discomfort. Last accessed 15 March 2019.
Gadd, D. and Broad, R. (2018), ‘Troubling Recognitions in British Responses to Modern
Slavery’, The British Journal of Criminology, 58: 1440–61.
Garland,  D. (1996), ‘The Limits of the Sovereign State: Strategies of Crime Control in
Contemporary Society’, The British Journal of Criminology, 36: 445–71.
—— (2001), Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Oxford University
Press.
Page 17 of 19
 ALIVERTI

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
Gentleman, A. (2019), The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment. The Guardian.
Gilson, E. (2016), ‘Vulnerability and Victimization: Rethinking Key Concepts in Feminist
Discourses on Sexual Violence’, Signs, 42: 71–98.
Hadjimatheou, K. and Lynch, J. (2016), ‘“Once They Pass you, They may be Gone Forever”:
Humanitarian Duties and Professional Tensions in Safeguarding and Anti-Trafficking at
the Border’, The British Journal of Criminology, 57: 945–63.
Hannah-Moffat,  K. (2005), ‘Criminogenic Needs and the Transformative Risk Subject:
Hybridizations of Risk/Need in Penality’, Punishment & Society, 7: 29–51.
Harcourt, B. (1999), ‘The Collapse of the Harm Principle’, The Journal of Criminal Law &
Criminology, 90: 109–94.
—— (2001), Illusion of Order. The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing. Harvard University
Press.
Heyman,  J. (2000), ‘Respect for Outsiders? Respect for the Law? The Moral Evaluation
of High-Scale Issues by US Immigration Officers’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute, 6: 635–52.
—— (2002), ‘US Immigration Officers of Mexican Americans, Citizens, and Immigration
Police’, Current Anthropology, 43: 479–507.
Her Majesty Government (2018), Government Response to the Interim Report by the Independent
Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. Cm 9756. HM Government.
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (2015), PEEL: Police Effectiveness 2015
(Vulnerability) A National Overview. HMIC.
Holdaway, S. and Parker, S. (1998), ‘Policing Women Police: Uniform Patrol, Promotion
and Representation in the CID’, The British Journal of Criminology, 38: 40–60.
Husak, D. (2008), Overcriminalization. The Limits of the Criminal Law. Oxford University Press.
Jones,  H., Gunaratnam,  Y. and Bhattacharyya,  G. (2017), Go Home?: The Politics of
Immigration Controversies. Manchester University Press.
Keay,  S. and Kirby,  S. (2017), ‘Defining Vulnerability: From the Conceptual to the
Operational’, Policing, 12: 428–38.
Lacey,  N. (2008), The Prisoners’ Dilemma. Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary
Democracies. Cambridge University Press.
Lipsky, M. (2010), Street-level Bureaucracy. Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. Russel
Sage Foundation.
Loader, I. (2010), ‘For Penal Moderation: Notes Towards a Public Philosophy of Punishment’,
Theoretical Criminology, 14: 349–67.
Lumsden,  K. and Black,  A. (2017), ‘Austerity Policing, Emotional Labour and the
Boundaries of Police Work: An Ethnography of a Police Force Control Room in England’,
The British Journal of Criminology, 58: 606–23.
Maxwell, D. and Gelsdorf, K. (2019), Understanding the Humanitarian World. Routledge.
Melossi,  D., Sozzo,  M. and Brandariz  García,  J. (eds) (2017), The Political Economy of
Punishment Today: Visions, Debates and Challenges. Routledge.
Menichelli, F. (2019), ‘Governing Through Vulnerability in Austerity England’, European
Journal of Criminology, 1–18. doi: 10.1177/1477370819880154.
Munro, V. E. (2017), ‘Shifting Sands? Consent, Context and Vulnerability in Contemporary
Sexual Offences Policy in England and Wales’, Social & Legal Studies, 26: 417–40.
Munro, V. and Scoular, J. (2013), ‘Harm, Vulnerability, and Citizenship: Constitutional
Concerns in the Criminalization of Contemporary Sex Work’, in R.  Duff, L.  Farmer,

Page 18 of 19
 VULNERABILITY AND THE MORAL PAINS OF BORDER CONTROLS

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaa026/5813873 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 24 April 2020
S.  Marshall, M.  Renzo and V.  Tadros, eds, The Constitution of the Criminal Law, 30–52.
Oxford University Press.
National Crime Agency (2019), National Referral Mechanism Statistics—End of Year Summary
2018. NCA.
O’malley,  P. (1999), ‘Volatile and Contradictory Punishment’, Theoretical Criminology, 3:
175–96.
Paasche,  E., Skilbrei,  M. and Plambech,  S. (2018), ‘Vulnerable Here or There?
Examining the Vulnerability of Victims of Human Trafficking Before and After Return’,
Anti-Trafficking Review, 10: 34–51.
Papazoglou, K. and Chopko, B. (2017), ‘The Role of Moral Suffering (Moral Distress and
Moral Injury) in Police Compassion Fatigue and PTSD: An Unexplored Topic’, Frontiers
in Psychology, 8: 1–5.
Platt, A. (1969), The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. The Chicago University Press.
Pratt,  J., Brown,  D., Brown,  M., Hallsworth,  S. and Morrison,  W. (eds) (2011), The New
Punitiveness. Trends, Theories, Perspectives. Routledge.
Ramsay,  P. (2012), The Insecurity State: Vulnerable Autonomy and the Right to Security in the
Criminal Law. Oxford University Press.
Rudd,  A. (2016), ‘Home Secretary’s College of Policing Speech on Vulnerability Home
Office’, 30 November 2016, available online at https://www.gov.uk/government/
speeches/home-secretarys-college-of-policing-speech-on-vulnerability. Last accessed 15
July 2019.
Smith, K. and Waite, L. (2019), ‘New and Enduring Narratives of Vulnerability: Rethinking
Stories About the Figure of the Refugee’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 45:
2289–307.
Sözer, H. (2019), ‘Humanitarianism With a Neo-Liberal Face: Vulnerability Intervention
as Vulnerability Redistribution’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 1–18. doi:
10.1080/1369183X.2019.1573661
Stamatov, P. (2013), The Origins of Global Humanitarianism: Religion, Empires, and Advocacy.
Cambridge University Press.
Tomczak, P. and Thompson, D. (2019), ‘Inclusionary Control? Theorizing the Effects of
Penal Voluntary Organizations’ Work’, Theoretical Criminology, 23: 4–24.
Turner, L. (2019), ‘The Politics of Labeling Refugee Men as “Vulnerable”’, Social Politics,
1–23.
Walklate, S. (2011), ‘Reframing Criminal Victimization: Finding a Place for Vulnerability
and Resilience’, Theoretical Criminology, 15: 179–94.
Walters,  W. (2011), ‘Foucault and Frontiers. Notes on the Birth of the Humanitarian
Border’, in U. Brockling, S. Krasmann and T. Lemke, eds, Governmentality: Current Issues
and Future Challenges, 138–64. Routledge.
Whitehead, P. and Statham, R. (2006), The History of Probation: Politics, Power and Cultural
Change 1876–2005. Shaw and Sons.
Zacka,  B. (2017), When the State Meets the Street. Public Service and Moral Agency. Harvard
University Press.
Zedner, L. (2009), Security. Routledge.

Page 19 of 19