Sexual abuse of migrants in British detention centre

Yarl's Wood Detention Centre

In Parliament on Tuesday 15 October, the Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather challenged the government to come clean about a sexual abuse scandal.* Clare Sambrook writes.

Male guards employed by the commercial contractor Serco have, allegedly, been sexually abusing vulnerable women in their care at Yarl's Wood, the Home Office's Immigration Removal Centre in Bedfordshire.

The former families minister asked: Would the Home Secretary ensure that Serco's reports on the scandal were published? Would the Home Office investigate?

What procedures were there to protect women from sexual assault and harassment? And had the Home Secretary reviewed the policy of detaining women for immigration purposes?

How does the government's reply stand up to scrutiny? Let's take it apart.

Speaking for the government, the Tory immigration minister Mark Harper said: "Detention plays a key role in the maintenance of an effective immigration control."

And: "We are committed to ensuring that all detained persons are held safely and that they are treated with dignity and respect."

In fact detainees' safety has been contracted out to commercial operators whose ethos and training has proved wanting, as demonstrated most dreadfully by the unlawful killing of Jimmy Mubenga, and in other more subtle ways every day on the detention estate.

At Yarl's Wood, for instance, as a report from HM Inspectorate of Prisons reveals today, pregnant women are detained regardless of Home Office rules which say this should happen only in exceptional circumstances...

Read Clare Sambrook's full article here: www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/clare-sambrook/truth-about-sexual-abuse-in-british-detention-centre

*www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm131015/text/131015w0001.htm#131015w0001.htm_wqn65