Promoting the rights of women seeking asylum in the UK
End Child Detention
Women for Refugee Women welcomes the announcement from the new coalition government that they will end the detention of children for immigration purposes. Help us to ensure that the government follows through on its promise.
What you can do
Join the OutCry campaign by the Children’s Society and Bail for Immigration Detainees OutCry
Join the End Child Detention Now campaign www.ecdn.org and sign the petition on the Number Ten website
Support an organisation that works directly with women and children who are detained in Yarls Wood to help them access their legal rights, such as Bail for Immigration Detainees, Refugee and Migrant Justice, or the Yarl’s Wood Befrienders
What Women for Refugee Women does
Karin Littlewood and Beverley Naidoo
We show our performance event Motherland, which tells the true stories of women and children held in Yarls Wood immigration removal centre.
We work with families and journalists to tell the stories of families who have experienced detention - read the stories of Meltem and Jasmine in the New Statesman ("The detainees have got pain in their eyes") or the story of Amina in the Guardian ( Asylum seekers speak: 'Nothing can give us back the last seven years')
We work to increase understanding about what is going on in detention centres. In December 2009 we organised a visit to Yarl’s Wood detention centre by Beverley Naidoo, children’s writer, and Karin Littlewood, illustrator. Beverley’s extraordinary piece about holding a workshop with the children in detention was published in the Guardian.
It is time to end this hidden scandal
Recent peer-reviewed research has uncovered the shocking mental health outcomes for children who are detained. “Children made ‘sick with fear’ in UK immigration centres”, Guardian, 13 October 2009 Children made 'sick with fear' in UK immigration detention centres
One young girl recently tried to commit suicide on being detained for a second time. “Her aunt's home was raided by 15 immigration officials, and representatives from the police and social services, and Adeoti was dragged out screaming...” Guardian, 23 October 2009 Removal halted of girl who tried to kill herself
Meltem Avcil was detained for 3 months in Yarls Wood
At 7 o'clock in the morning in August last year, at our home in Doncaster, I woke up to hear banging on the door. As soon as my mum opened the door, these men rushed in. They told us to be quick: they were shouting in our ears. They took us to the police station and then a car came and it was awful. It had a cage. For a minute, I thought to myself: Am I an animal? The journey took a long time and we ended up in Yarl's Wood. It's a detention centre, but it is no different from a jail.