Human rights issues are notoriously controversial. Debates rage around numerous issues, not least the validity and universality of human rights themselves. However, the detention of children for immigration purposes stands out as one human rights issue for which there is a remarkable extent of consensus, in both the damage it causes and the need for action to bring it to an end.

Several studies have shown beyond doubt the severe psychological damage and physical danger that child detention leads to, even where that detention is for very short periods of time. Such studies have been reported in the British Journal Child Abuse and Neglect, and Australian psychiatric journals. Numerous accounts have been reported of children self-harming and attempting suicide in detention centres in the UK alone, while other reports identify the mental health problems that can occur in later life as a result of periods of detention.

These are children, we must remember, who have committed no offence and broken no law. The only reason for their detention is that their parents have applied for asylum in our country. Furthermore, it is widely accepted that among undocumented migrants, children and families with children are some of the least likely candidates for absconding. Even David Wood of the UKBA admitted this to the Home Affairs Select Committee back in 2009.

The campaign group ‘End Child Detention Now’ is one of a huge number of groups working on this issue just in the UK. Many more provide similar opposition across Europe and indeed the world. Here, we have had assurances from the UK coalition government that the practice that Deputy PM Nick Clegg has called ‘state-sponsored cruelty’ would end.

So, given this widespread opposition to the practice and general agreement from those in power, it is surprising that entirely innocent children can still be detained in the UK, due only to the arbitrary lottery of nationality. While the government has taken some action to reduce the practice, there is no real end in sight.

Government promises count for little, as we have seen first-hand. This is why a concerted effort must be made to apply as much pressure as possible during the Ministerial Level meeting of all UN member states at the UNHCR in Geneva next month. This meeting is taking place to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the 1961 Refugee Convention, on the 7th and 8th December, and it is a perfect opportunity to convince our governments to make international commitments to ending child detention.

Further action:
The International Detention Coalition is running a letter-writing campaign in coordination with the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, and Amnesty International, and you can find out more about this here. They have a template letter, adaptable to your organisation and national situation, which can be downloaded here.

This piece was written by Clare Sambrook and first appeared at OpenDemocracy

Back in October, a study by NHS paediatricians and psychologists, Lorek et al, found that babies and children were being harmed at Yarl’s Wood detention centre.

The doctors recorded children’s ‘increased fear due to being suddenly placed in a facility resembling a prison’, their weight loss and tummy pains, how older children were so stressed they wet their beds and soiled their pants.

The study related the photographing and the fingerprinting, the roll calls and the body searches, the ID cards that children must carry at all times, the ten locked doors between freedom and the family centre, the steep deterioration in parents’ mental health and parenting abilities, the self-harm and the suicide attempts.

And the sex games. One father, ‘spontaneously complained that he had found his daughter in the center without any clothes on. His child explained that she had been encouraged to undress and play “sex games” instigated by another detained child.’

Another mother, ‘spontaneously commented on the sexualized behavior of children within the center’.

The doctors wrote, ‘the experience of detention, even for a relatively brief period of time, has a detrimental effect on the mental and physical health of children.’

Members of Parliament from the Home Affairs Select Committee were handed copies of the doctors’ study before they visited Yarl’s Wood during their inquiry into the detention of children in mid-October.

But when the MPs published their report in late November, it contained not a word about the doctors’ work.

Between the MPs reading the doctors’ study and the MPs deciding not to write about it, someone else had sat down to write.

‘I thought it would be helpful to provide some further details in response to concern you may have about the contents of the report,’ Dave Wood, the UK Border Agency’s strategic director of criminality and detention told the Committee in an undated memo.

‘The study took place over 3 years ago yet this was the first time that report had been made available to us.’

He went on: ‘The study was undertaken without any reference to the UK Border Agency or its clinicians. At no point were healthcare or centre staff, who would have known the children, asked for their views or comments.’

But that’s not true. Here on my desk I’ve got Home Office documents about the discussions that were held between the doctors who wrote the study and senior UK Border Agency staff two years before the study was handed to MPs.

Here’s a letter from Jo Heatley, a Border Agency adviser, dated 17 August 2007, confirming that ‘research conducted by Ann Lorek, Kim Enholt [sic] and other health professionals, was presented at a round table discussion.’

Heatley noted: ‘An agreed action point put forward by Jeremy Oppenheim, [then the Border Agency’s ‘Children’s Champion’] was to set up a meeting for the researchers to present their material to key officials from the Border and Immigration Agency, the detention service provider, the escort service provider and Bedfordshire Children’s Services.’

That meeting took place inside Yarl’s Wood on 27 September 2007. The Home Office Agenda confirms that two of the study’s authors gave a talk entitled ‘physical and mental health difficulties of children within a UK immigration detention centre: a pilot study’.

Among the 26 attendees were the Border Agency’s ‘Children’s Champion’ and Brian Pollett, then head of Detention Services, along with Yarl’s Wood social workers and healthcare staff including the health centre manager.

In the first few days of December, the citizens’ campaign group End Child Detention Now (I’m one of the pro-bono coordinators) sent copies of these documents to Home Affairs Select Committee members and staff. The Home Office and the Border Agency were also alerted to Mr Wood’s mistakes.

But when Home Office minister Meg Hillier, stood up in the House on Monday 14 December to defend the detention of children, she repeated one of Wood’s inaccuracies –

Let me point out that the report in question did not take into account the views of the clinicians who worked with those children and who know them.

– and threw in one all of her own: ‘There are many pressures on children, and it is not clear that those pressures and problems arise merely from detention.’

The evidence is crystal clear. According to the peer-reviewed medical evidence, children experienced ‘a sudden deterioration in mental health due to the experience of detention rather than any pre-existing problems.’

While the Government misrepresents the evidence, children’s suffering goes on. Only today, Dr Frank Arnold, from the Medical Justice Network, told me, ‘Significant harm is frequent, and as recent as last month. We see recurring evidence of painful and hazardous failures of clinical care, of serious psychological damage including regression, soiling, depression, and PTSD among the majority of these children.’

Dr Arnold has initiated a doctors’ petition calling upon the government to stop the administrative detention of children and families. A petition on the Number 10 website calling upon Gordon Brown to stop detaining children can be found here.

Sources

‘The mental and physical health difficulties of children held within a British immigration detention center: A pilot study,’ published in Child Abuse and Neglect 2009; 33: 573

http://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/resources/documents/Campaigns/19432.html

‘The Detention of Children in the Immigration System: First Report of Session 2009–10,’ House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, 29 November 2009

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmhaff/73/73.pdf

By Simon Parker

In a report released today the Home Affairs Select Committee expressed a number of concerns about the detention of children in the UK immigration system but failed to acknowledge that the detention of children for any length of time is abusive and harmful to their well being. In the first part of its report the Committee declares:

‘..it must be remembered that Yarl’s Wood remains essentially a prison…while we accept that conditions have improved, we still regret that such a facility is needed in the first place’.

Unfortunately the committee’s regret that the UKBA runs child prisons did not extend to recommending that the Home Office stop locking children up in them.

‘We are…willing to accept the detention of families and small children provided that this is for short periods of time which ideally are defined in advance, and when this is the very final stage in the immigration removal process’.

It is astonishing that the Select Committee could ignore the very clear advice from the Children’s Commissioner, Sir Al Aynsley Green that,

‘…depriving children of their liberty and detaining them for administrative convenience is never likely to be in their best interests and should be ended’

while they completely ignored the only peer reviewed medical research into Yarl’s Wood that showed that even short periods of detention are damaging to children’s physical and mental health.

The Select Committee’s argument that detention should only be used as ‘a last resort’ is one that the UKBA has repeatedly made—but all the evidence suggests that detention is being used more frequently against families and children to drive up immigration removal targets.

In declaring that ‘there is no evidence of families systematically “disappearing” or absconding’ the Select Committee has shown that one of the main arguments used by the Home Office to detain children and families is entirely bogus.

The figures given by the UKBA and on which the Home Office relies suggest that ‘nearly 1,000 children’ are detained each year, but the Select Committee was ‘unable to discover how many individual families with children have been detained in the last year’. The committee described the non-availability of such figures as ‘troubling’.  Even more troubling is that a third more children were detained in the last three months than in the previous quarter. According to Home Office’s figures released last week – 315 children entered immigration detention in quarter 3 of 2009, compared to 235 in the previous quarter. 240 of the children most recently detained were under 11 years old. The Home Office also declared that between July 2008 and July 2009 1,315 children were detained across ‘the detention estate’. The considerable fluctuations in these figures suggest that despite its scepticism the Select Committee is under-reporting the true extent of child detention, and that the Children’s Commission estimate of ‘nearly 2,000‘ detentions is much closer to the truth.

The Select Committee also appears to have completely accepted the ‘it’s all the fault of vexatious and frivolous legal challenges’ line from the Home Office without attempting to do more than cite one source from the National Audit Office on the number of unsuccessful requests for judicial review. In fact most challenges to removal succeed because, against all odds a handful of dedicated lawyers are prepared to challenge a shockingly high number of poor initial caseworker and immigration tribunal decisions.

Given the difficulties in accessing even basic, qualified legal advice very few detained families make applications for judicial review. In fact, judicial review is notoriously difficult for any regular plaintiff to achieve and the Law Society has rebuked Woolas for claiming that such cases were only brought to prolong an applicant’s stay. Thus far from indulging in ‘frivolous appeals‘, as Woolas misleadingly asserts, detained asylum seekers are more poorly served by the legal system and more heavily discriminated against than any other group in British society.

For example, in the case of the parents of a very young child all of whom were detained in Yarl’s Wood earlier this summer, we had to telephone 31 separate firms of solicitors before eventually finding a lawyer who was prepared to help. Such a task would have been impossible for the highly traumatised family concerned, and had it not been for this fortunate intervention, instead of winning leave to remain the family would have been forcibly returned to the country from where they fled persecution and arbitrary imprisonment – an irony that seems lost on their British government jailers.

Mr Vaz and his Select Committee colleagues may be willing to accept the detention of families and small children, but fortunately many of his fellow MPs and thousands of citizens and voters do not. Those who put the interests of children before the profits of the detention industry are rushing to sign Chris Mullin’s early day motion calling for child detention to end. Thousands more are signing the No10 petition in favour of keeping children in the immigration system out of jail. Please join us in declaring that imprisonment should be a ‘non resort’ not a ‘last resort’ for children. Together we can end child detention now.

By Clare Sambrook, a co-ordinator of citizens’ campaign End Child Detention Now

Community Care, November 4 2009.

One key feature of government guidance issued this week on how UK Border Agency staff should care for the children they lock up, is ‘safer recruitment’. Officers raiding family homes and searching children in their beds will be thoroughly checked, with ‘references always taken up’.

That begs the question: just how low were standards until now?
Actually, we don’t need to guess how bad things are in UKBA’s asylum-seeker prisons.

“State-sanctioned neglect”

Families fresh out of detention confirm in every detail the recent report (pdf) by paediatricians and psychologists in Child Abuse & Neglect who found that children detained at Yarl’s Wood were ‘clearly vulnerable, marginalized, and at risk of mental and physical harm as a result of state sanctioned neglect.’

The doctors recorded comments from parents about their children’s ‘sexualised behaviour’, about older children’s tendency to wet their beds and soil their pants, about the ‘increased fear due to being suddenly placed in a facility resembling a prison’, about the ‘abrupt loss of home, school friends and all that was familiar to them.’

The doctors reported the photographing and the fingerprinting, the roll calls and the body searches, the ID cards that children must carry at all times, the ten locked doors between freedom and the family centre, the steep deterioration in parents’ mental health and parenting abilities, the self-harm and the suicide attempts.

Human suffering

To speak, as the government did this week, of giving children the ‘opportunity to thrive’ in the context of this moral calamity would be laughable if it were not for the human suffering behind every statistic.

Last weekend, immigration minister Phil Woolas revealed in a letter to Pete Wishart MP that 889 children from 488 families had been detained for more than 28 days between April 2004 and September 2009.

No matter how good the guidance, nor how diligently some people may follow it, the fact is that innocent children, whatever their immigration status, do not belong in prison.

It harms them. There is no need for it. There is no evidence that families with children are likely to abscond. The detention of asylum seeking children is absolutely unacceptable. It is state-sponsored child-abuse and it must stop.

End Child Detention Now has launched a petition calling upon the government to stop detaining children.