End Child Detention Now

Responding to an article by Mary Dejevesky in Tuesday’s  (15 December) Independent which accused end child detention campaigners and supporters – such as the more than 60 children’s authors and illustrators who signed an open letter to Gordon Brown – of being cynical and financially motivated in using Paddington Bear and the Christmas season to highlight the plight of children kept in detention centres; Simon Parker for End Child Detention Now rejected all of Dejevsky’s accusations in a letter published in today’s Independent (Thursday 17 December). He pointed out that all of the people involved in the campaign do so completely voluntarily and that we have no interest in ‘infiltrating anyone’s wallets’. We make no apology for focussing on children because they are the most vulnerable victims of our country’s insane policy of imprisoning families whose asylum claims have ‘failed’.

On the same page, the author Beverley Naidoo who recently visited Yarl’s Wood with the illustrator Karin Littlewood, asks Dejevsky if she would prefer children’s authors to ‘sit at “the little people’s table” and keep their mouths shut’?

Beverley’s moving and absorbing account of her story telling workshop with the children of Yarl’s Wood was published in Guardian Society on Wednesday with a link to the ECDN No10 petition, which has since seen a surge of new signatures taking the petition to over 3,000 supporters.

Thanks to Natasha Walter at Women for Refugee Women for arranging Beverley and Karin’s visit to Yarl’s Wood.

The letters are reproduced below:

Letters: Child detention

There are alternatives to locking up children

Thursday, 17 December 2009

Mary Dejevsky (“It’s not only the young who suffer”, 15 December), accuses those campaigning for an end to child detention of being simultaneously guileless, cynically selective in their empathy, and avaricious. As a coordinator of End Child Detention Now – no paid staff and no interest in infiltrating anyone’s wallets – might I respond to her charges?

Opponents of child detention urge the Government to look seriously at community-based alternatives. Countries such as Sweden and Canada do not have an “open borders” policy, but they manage to keep children and their parents out of high-security detention facilities.

Keeping a family of four in Yarl’s Wood costs £3,640 a week. If that money was used to prepare families for their eventual return in supported community accommodation (such as the current Glasgow pilot) and to provide support and monitoring post-removal, a higher rate of voluntary returns might result—as it does in Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Even the UK Border Agency admits that detention serves primarily as a deterrent to would be asylum-seekers, and that families are unlikely to abscond.

Ms Dejevsky says that some individuals who present as minors turn out not to be. It is also the case that some detained as adults turn out to be minors. Notwithstanding that, UKBA is for no good reason detaining large numbers of children and babies, causing them significant harm.

We focus on children because they are the most vulnerable. We have seen at first hand the traumatic impact of detention on parents and children alike. Had Mary Dejevsky spoken to such a family she might not be so quick to condemn those who raise their voices in protest.

Simon Parker

End Child Detention Now, York

Mary Dejevsky believes “Children’s writers have been discovering a new activist side recently”. I suspect many of us who signed the open letter against detention of child asylum seekers have exercised our democratic rights to engage in public discourse for somewhat longer than she may remember. Perhaps Ms Dejevsky feels that children’s writers should sit at “the little people’s table” and keep their mouths shut?

Beverley Naidoo

Bournemouth