FIVE YEARS OF DENIAL: the UK government’s reckless pursuit of a punitive asylum policy – never mind the evidence of harm.
Download the report here: OurKingdom Dossier 2
The UK government has knowingly harmed between 1000 and 2000 children of asylum-seekers every year, sending dawn hit squads to raid family homes, search children in their beds and lock them up (sometimes for weeks and months) in places known to harm their mental and physical health. All in the name of ‗border control‘, driven by a political desire to look tough on immigration — and executed in venal disregard of a startling truth that the UK Border Agency let slip in evidence to Parliament last year: absconding is not an issue. (Source: Hansard)
The citizens‘ campaign End Child Detention Now has gathered some of the compelling research that the Home Office has variously ignored, misrepresented and buried these past five years. The research provides irrefutable evidence of damage done to children by detention and by other harmful and state-sanctioned practices.
Some of this research years ago offered viable alternatives to detention that the government chose to ignore, preferring dangerous and punitive practices that made politicians look tough — at the expense of children‘s health and sanity. Continue reading “The immediate end of child detention is essential but it is only the first step”