Photo: Gareth Harper
“People were shouting. There were crashing noises. I thought I was in a dream. Four people came in my room, told me get up, get ready. I didn’t know how to make myself dressed. I thought, ‘I’m going to wake up and this is a bad dream’.
“In the living room: my father, my brother in handcuffs. My father is crying. My mother is crying. I never saw my father cry. I told the lady, ‘What is wrong with you? I can’t go to detention. I am 13 and I am going to school today, and why are you putting handcuffs on my father? He is a human being’.
“My brothers were too quiet. They grabbed my dad and took him out of the house. Then my brother, Elvis. He is 18 and very quiet, and he did not want to go in handcuffs but they made him. Then they took me, my mother and other brother. I didn’t want our neighbours to see me.
“I want to come home now. I was excited to go to school that day… I don’t want to be in Yarl’s Wood. We can’t go out. Too many people are sad. My brothers are quiet, my father and mother are too upset. Someone killed himself here.”
13-year-old Saida Vucaj’s account of her family’s forcible removal from their Drumchapel, Glasgow home in a dawn raid by immigration authorities and their subsequent journey to Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in England has recurred hundreds of times with hundreds of different faces.
The continuing detention of failed asylum seekers and their families in immigration detention facilities has been the subject of debate in Scotland since the creation of Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre in 2001. Voices running the gamut from pressure groups to Scotland’s Commissioner for Children and Young People have protested what human rights lawyer and Children’s Commissioner Professor Kathleen Marshall has labelled “a clear breach of human rights”.
“The argument is not whether a country should have control over its borders, but about the way in which they do it. There must be alternative ways of dealing with this than traumatising children and families in this way.”
With this milieu informing him, incoming Secretary of State for Scotland Jim Murphy announced last October the introduction of an alternative to detention for failed asylum seekers with families. Rather than being incarcerated in Dungavel, a pilot scheme would see up to four families at a time being housed in former council flats in Glasgow, allowing them access to basic facilities such as a washing machine, fridge and furniture for around two weeks before being repatriated.
The proposed £150,000 pilot, a joint project between Glasgow City Council and the UK Border Agency, is similar to one trialled in Kent, although in England the families were held in hotel rooms away from the city centre.
Speaking in October 2008, Murphy, father of two, said: “This is a trial based on the concerns raised in particular by churches in Scotland.
“As Secretary of State for Scotland, one of the first things I did was to see whether we could bring this process forward. I would hope to be able for it to be actually launched at the start of the new year.
“I want to see if we can do something that is sensible, but also sensitive, that looks after the children.
“The truth is that no politician of any party would ever like to see families being put behind the barbed wire in Dungavel.”
Six months on, and four months after the project was tentatively earmarked to commence, nothing has changed.
The Unity Centre in Glasgow has recorded at least 16 children being detained with their families in Dungavel since the beginning of 2009.
According to the Centre, since January 1st at least two single parent families with four children, a single mother from Botswana with a 14-month-old daughter, and a Nigerian mother with two infant sons, among others, have been detained. Of the 14 children recorded by the Centre, half have been forcibly removed from the UK with their parents.
Most recently, a 12-year-old girl and her mother were detained on March 18th after reporting at the UK Border Agency in Glasgow. Another mother and two-year-old baby were detained on the 14th of April.
Alice Lithgow, a volunteer at the Unity Centre, said: ”Detention is supposed to be the last resort for children and is only supposed to be used for families that are considered to be a high risk of absconding. It is difficult to understand how any single mum with four children, some of whom require medical treatment, could be considered to be a high risk of absconding. Of all groups of detainees, single mums with young children are the group that are the least likely to abscond.”
Phil (last name withheld), another volunteer, said: “Being detained is one of the most traumatic experiences imaginable. The reason why it’s called detention and not imprisonment is because these people aren’t criminals. They have not been convicted of any criminal offence when they are detained.
“In the UK we don’t detain the children of criminals, of violent gangsters or drug dealers or rapists. So we should not be detaining the children of people who have not been convicted of any crime.
“Think of what it does to a child’s self esteem and sense of identity to see their parents being handcuffed, to watch them being taken in that way. They issue all the children ID cards. The babies are fingerprinted and their photos taken.”
The Children’s Commissioner for Scotland has threatened to report both the UK and the Scottish government to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, as the continued confinement of asylum seeking children under the age of 16 contravenes several sections of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, which the UK ratified in part in 1991, and became a full signatory in September 2008.
While the Scottish government has no authority to intervene in Dungavel, as asylum matters are reserved to Westminster, the Scottish Executive and local councils are responsible for ensuring child welfare.
Concerns have been raised about the negative impact of imprisonment on children of any age.
Chief Executive John Wilkes of the Scottish Refugee Council said: “Scottish Refugee Council firmly believes that children, families and other vulnerable groups should not be detained for the purpose of immigration. Detention, even for a short period, is a traumatic experience for children, inhumane and has a serious impact on their physical and mental health, personal development and education.”
Criminologist and former prison governor Professor David Wilson of Birmingham City University said: “We know that any kind of coercive institutional environment is simply bad for children. It stigmatizes, it isolates, it increases their risk of self-harming, it removes them from pro-social environments in the community and ultimately it damages us all.”
Half a year after the preliminary announcement, even less details are available. A spokesperson for the UK Border Agency could not confirm any time frame, or the number of families to be involved in the pilot, stating that details were yet to finalized.
A spokesperson for Glasgow City Council echoed that uncertainty, stating: “ It is hoped the project will become operational in the near future.”
HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales 2006-2007 Annual Report highlighted the simmering issues at UK detention centres.
“Children continue to be detained in considerable numbers and are held for a month before there is any social work assessment of their welfare. At Dungavel, we found that the incidence and length of children’s detention had increased during 2006.
“Detainees at Dungavel were routinely handcuffed in public areas, both on the journey there and at subsequent court appearances, without any individual risk assessment, despite our previous recommendations.”
Human rights activist and director of Positive Action in Housing Robina Qureshi, addressed a rally after receiving a 4:00 am phone call from a weeping and distressed Saida Vucaj from behind the bars of Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre.
“As the horrific treatment of our fellow human beings comes to light, charities, churches and ordinary Scottish people are expressing their outrage and using the word ‘ashamed’ repeatedly. The Westminster government and the Scottish Executive tells us that the treatment of asylum seekers is ‘reserved’, i.e. ‘none of your business’. Let the Scottish Executive and the Westminster government be under no illusion.
“This is our business. We will not stand by and allow such inhumanity to go on against our fellow human beings – even if they are ‘asylum-seekers’.”
