we should be doing better than this

I just read this article which appeared in the Guardian yesterday, very sobering stuff... There is an online petition you can sign if you, like me, want the Government to know you think what they are doing here is wrong.

From the Guardian, Wednesday 16 December 2009:

Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre is not exactly easy to reach. Our taxi from Bedford station drives through the village of Clapham, with its 11th-century church and ancient yews, then out again through fields. Suddenly, we see low-lying buildings like those on a modern industrial estate. A lone man walks purposefully with a dog. From inside a glass-paned office, a man waves us through the boom gates. His uniform could be that of a security guard in any official establishment.

Karin Littlewood is an illustrator and I'm a writer. We're going to run a storytelling workshop – organised by Women for Refugee Women – with children detained in Yarl's Wood, and we have been instructed to bring Criminal Records Bureau "enhanced disclosure" forms and visual ID. This concern over child protection sits oddly with instances of children being seized in dawn raids.

About 1,000 children are locked up every year under immigration rules, many of them in families who have sought asylum. Yarl's Wood is the main centre for detaining children, with about 30 held at any one time. Although the government says it detains families only as a last resort, just prior to removal, the majority of these children are released back into the community. Many will later be granted leave to remain in the UK.

We step into the visitors' centre under a sign that reads: "Serco bringing service to life." Karin has brought rolls of drawing paper, as well as original paintings from our picture book Baba's Gift. We've had to specify in advance every item that we wish to bring. Apart from books to give to the children and library, our list includes a little wooden elephant and hippo, a finger-puppet hare, a small mbira (thumb piano) and an oyster shell.

As we walk along an empty corridor, I scribble down words from a notice: "Yarl's Wood IRC is committed to promoting and celebrating racial equality and diversity." We are searched in a claustrophobic little room, with two women guards, then a door is unlocked and I step into a huge visitors' waiting room with comfy seats and children's toys, overseen by a single guard. By the time Karin has been processed, we've lost a third of our workshop time.

Five locked doors and corridors decorated with murals lead to Crane section for families – mainly mothers with children. We are introduced to the primary teacher. The young lady smiles and we shake hands, but my brain takes time to connect. She is wearing the Serco uniform, with keys attached to her waist. A guard-cum-teacher or a teacher-cum-guard?

Along more corridors and through an indoor sports hall, we come to patches of grass, high wire fences, and two elongated chalets that house newly-opened schoolrooms. The secondary schoolteacher, also with uniform and keys, greets us. It's unusual to run a workshop for people ranging in age from five to 16, but there is nothing usual about today.

School inside Yarl's Wood is voluntary. Today, three older students are attending, along with 11 younger children from Albania, Egypt, Namibia, Uganda, Kenya, Jamaica and Nigeria. Some have just arrived in Yarl's Wood. For one boy, it's his 37th day. As I give them my South African handshake, a boy of about 10 immediately asks whether I can speak Afrikaans. He asks, and I answer, in Afrikaans. I tell him I have forgotten a lot. Quietly, he replies: "My ook (Me too)." I catch the sadness in his eyes and ask: "What places do you know in South Africa?" Jo'burg, he says. "But I'm a Jo'burg girl!" I exclaim. I pull out a copy of my book Journey to Jo'burg. Within seconds, his head is buried in it.

Most of the children seem to speak English, and within seconds we are playing a name game to break the ice. I sense a generosity from the older students. How easy it would be for them to dismiss our workshop as something for little kids.

Introducing Baba's Gift, about two children's first trip to the seaside in South Africa, I recount how I wrote the story with my daughter, Maya. I slip in that many years ago I came to Britain seeking refuge. I tell them how Maya had wanted to set a story in the place where her father grew up, but from which we'd been cut off for many years. Karin interweaves my reading by showing her artwork close up, drawing in the teens. They are intrigued.

The children begin to open out. I retell a traditional African story from my collection, The Great Tug of War, about the little hare, Mmutla, who must use his wits against the powerful, bossier animals. Karin draws the animal characters as I act out how Mmutla tricks the elephant, Ttlou, and the hippo, Kubu, into a tug of war with each other. Beneath these age-old stories is the message about resilience that enslaved Africans carried to America and kept alive through Brer Rabbit. In identifying with the little hare, I hope the children may gain their own strength.
Our workshop has to finish before Karin has time to get everyone drawing, but she leaves a painting of Mmutla tugging a rope. It stretches across a long roll of paper, and the teachers say they will give the children a chance to draw in their own players for this new tug of war.
Karin asks the two small boys from Albania to help hold up the paper. They have avoided eye contact and been terribly quiet. If for a brief moment we might have almost forgotten where we are, these young siblings most visibly remind us that here are children undergoing a deeply traumatising experience.

The government has signed up to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, yet its policy runs completely counter to the spirit of the convention. It pays Serco to "normalise" the imprisonment of children – something morally abhorrent that should never be considered normal.

Moral issue

That is why almost 70 writers and illustrators for young people have this week signed an open letter to Gordon Brown, supporting the End Child Detention Now campaign. It follows a joint report by the Royal Colleges of General Practitioners, Paediatrics and Child Health, and Psychiatrists, and the UK Faculty of Public Health, warning that detaining children in immigration centres puts them at risk of mental health problems, self-harm and suicide, and demanding an end to the practice. This is a cross-party moral issue in which we should ask every MP to stand up to the rising tide of anti-immigrant xenophobia and support Chris Mullin MP's parliamentary motion to stop detaining children.

After leaving Yarl's Wood, we meet someone who knows it well, and who says the atmosphere inside has been subdued. Last week, she tells us, a woman was deported, naked. It was her final protest.

What else have these young people – who have struck us as so delightful and thoughtful – witnessed in their uprooted lives? Have we no shame?