The UK Home Office has announced plans to open a string of new Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs), including one exclusively for women in County Durham which is due to open in autumn 2021. The new IRC will be on the site of the former Medomsley Detention Centre, which housed young men aged 17-21 who had committed minor offences and closed in 1988 after a plethora of reports of abuse. The facility reopened as the Hassockfield Secure Training Centre from 1995 to 2015.
The plans have been controversial with local residents and organisations campaigning for the rights of asylum seekers. The Director of Women for Refugee Women, Alphonsine Kabagabo, commented on the organisation’s website that “opening a new detention centre for women at this time would be a betrayal of previous commitments made by ministers and a betrayal of all those brave women who have spoken up about their experiences in detention”.
Agnes Tanoh, a refugee woman and community organiser who spent three months in the notorious Yarl’s Wood detention centre in 2012, launched an online petition against the move, which has over 10,000 signatures at the time of writing. In her petition statement she writes: “I know how detention destroys a woman. Women become depressed and suicidal in detention. I don’t want to see this happen to any of my sisters who are looking for safety.”
The move has also caused concerns within the local community, as the Hassockfield site was originally proposed as a place for building properties for local people to curb a shortage of affordable housing in the area, with 10,500 people currently on the area’s waiting list for social housing.
Richard Holden, Conservative MP for North West Durham, commented on his website that, “The public expect us to maintain a strong immigration system and that’s what people voted for in the General Election. Immigration detention and removal plays a key role in this… We need a strong operation to stop people coming in and deporting those who have no right to be in the UK."
THE TROUBLED HISTORY OF DETENTION IN THE UK
The UK is one of the largest users of IRCs in Europe, with around 24,000 people held in UK detention centres every year. It is also the only places in Europe where asylum seekers can be detained for an indefinite amount of time.
One of the primary reasons for Immigration Removal Centres is to house migrants who will be imminently removed from the country. Despite this, the majority of detainees are released back into the wider community; in 2019 just 30 percent were actually removed from the UK. For the other 70 percent, their time in detention served no purpose. In this way, IRCs are used far beyond their stated purpose, and for this reason, the terms “IRC” and “detention centre” are often used interchangeably by NGOs.
According to Women for Refugee Women, around 2,000 women seeking asylum are locked up in detention every year. UK IRCs specifically for women asylum seekers have been consistently controversial in the past—the most notorious of which is Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire, which was surrounded by reports of physical and sexual abuse by staff since it opened in 2001.
The mental health implications of these detention centres are astounding. In 2014 Women for Refugee Women published a report in which they interviewed 46 women who had sought asylum and been detained, 44 of whom were taken to Yarl’s Wood. Of the women interviewed, 93 percent reported being depressed, 61 percent had considered suicide, and one-third were on suicide watch during their time in detention.
In a series of interviews provided exclusively to Human Rights Pulse by Manchester-based organisation Women Asylum Seekers Together, women recounted their negative experiences in these centres. One of the women commented that “detention made me feel like a criminal, this has left a permanent invisible scar in me”.
Another woman spoke of the long-lasting effects of her time in detention:
The time I was in a detention centre was the worst thing that happened in my life, even now I have nightmares, I always see these big men dressed in black coming to take me. The detention centre itself is a prison camp, we were treated like animals, very rough and so much inhuman abuse was happening in that detention centre. I saw mentally disturbed women, disabled people and old people who couldn't even walk. I have seen the most horrendous place in the UK, a place I thought I would find refuge only to be treated like a terrorist. I don't think I will ever recover from this horrific ordeal.
THE FUTURE FOR UK DETENTION CENTRES
Incarcerating migrants and asylum seekers is ineffective, unjust, and expensive. The cost of each person in detention per day is £97.54, adding up to a yearly government spending of £90 million on immigration detention. In addition, the UK government paid out £7 million in compensation to 272 people who had been wrongfully detained in 2019.
The Home Office must find compassionate alternatives and work with grassroots organisations across the UK to facilitate sustainable change and avoid a repetition of the travesties against women asylum seekers that occurred in Yarl’s Wood. Women in the UK asylum system need security, mental health support, and safe accommodation—not more prisons.
Alice Berkeley is a Religions and Theology with Middle Eastern Studies graduate from the University of Manchester. She has a specific interest in refugee and worker's rights, women’s issues and the MENA region.