ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reflexive account of my experiences interviewing women for my doctoral dissertation. Over the course of 12 months, from January to December 2015, I spent time with women in immigration detention and with women who had been released from detention into the UK community, and I travelled to Jamaica to interview others who had been deported. Participants were often emotional during interviews and shared with me intimate and distressing accounts of their lives before, during and after immigration detention. Their stories were not easy to hear. I felt anxious, guilty, angry and hopeless long after the interviews had concluded. Though many colleagues in the field of border criminology have shared similar emotional responses to their work, very little is written to inform researchers how these feelings can sometimes hijack and limit projects. Thus, in this chapter I use the example of my own experiences to explore the nature and impact of vicarious and secondary trauma.
