#SetHerFree: We want Yarl’s Wood to close, not just today, or tomorrow, but forever!

June 6, 2015 by 5 Comments

 

Hundreds of people showed up at Yarl’s Wood today, with one message. Shut it down now! Never open it again! Set her free! #SetHerFree. The hundreds included activists, organizers, advocates, and unusual suspects. Green Party and Conservative Party members showed up in support. Women chanted from one side of the fence surrounding the prison, and the women inside Yarl’s Wood responded, amplifying the demand to shut it down immediately and permanently. Lively protesters successfully pulled down parts of the outside perimeter fence, to the cheering of those inside as well as outside. Action unites.

The event was organized primarily by Women for Refugee Women, in coalition with other groups. Delighted at the numbers and energy of the turnout, Women for Refugee Women spokeswoman Sophie Radice commented, “The time was right for this protest because now people know what’s going on they want to take action. People come here to seek asylum and we lock them up like criminals. We will not stop campaigning until it is shut down … The atmosphere is defiant and it’s been a real show of force. We’ll carry on until the abomination that is Yarl’s Wood is shut down.”

When asked about the “problem with illegal immigration”, Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights organization Liberty, responded, “There is a problem in the world with turmoil and war and also for displaced people who need who need support and protection. But why should human rights abuses only be a justification for wars `over there’ and not refugee and human rights laws over here? … These brave women – some pregnant; some survivors of rape and torture; some suffering from mental or physical health problems – are indefinitely detained in a prison where abuse is endemic. Yarl’s Wood shames our great nation of immigrants – elsewhere criminal suspects detained without charge must be released after 14 days. Shut it down and set them free.”

As a local Conservative MP explained, 15 years ago, detention of asylum seekers was rare. Now “it’s the default.” It’s costly, ineffective, and inhumane, and that’s from a tough-on-immigration Conservative.

Yarl’s Wood is supposed to be the house of the dead, a factory that churns out packets of pain, suffering, and ultimately death. But the women of Yarl’s Wood have refused to lie down and die. They have rejected the special hell slotted for them. In 2010, at the age of 16, former Yarl’s Wood prisoner Meltem Avcil began campaigning to shut it down. In 2007, women asylum seekers banded together to take care of each other, help one another with anti-deportation campaigns, and to publicize the particulars of being a woman asylum seeker in Britain in 2007. They formed Women Asylum Seekers Together, WAST, as a women only safe space for those threatened every second of every day, women asylum seekers. Today, eight years later, they are all over the country.

Lydia Besong left Yarl’s Wood and wrote a play, How I Became an Asylum Seeker, which WAST took up and performed across the country. Nigerian lesbian feminist Aderonke Apata was dumped into Yarl’s Wood, or so they thought. She organized, founded Manchester MiSol, Manchester Migrant Solidarity, who hooked up with WAST, and today Yarl’s Wood was surrounded by chants, songs, and bodies pushing against the fence. Shut it down! Shut it down! Set her free!

Not long ago, WAST formed a choir, the Nightingales, who sing of women’s rights, women’s power, women’s dreams, and they begin, but it’s only a beginning, with this: “We want Yarl’s Wood to close, not just today, or tomorrow, but forever”. Sing it loud, sing it proud, shut it down, set her free, not just today, or tomorrow, but forever. Amen.

 

(Photo Credit 1: BBC)  (Photo Credit 2: Women for Refugee Women) (Video Credit: Channel 4 / YouTube)

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#SetHerFree: Women call for the closure of Yarl’s Wood and beyond

January 16, 2015 by 4 Comments

Women for Refugee Women’s latest report, I Am Human: Refugee women’s experiences of detention in the UK is hard and all too familiar reading. Women seek asylum because they have been tortured, raped, forced into marriage, persecuted, and then they are imprisoned and tortured anew when they apply for asylum. Two thousand women are locked up in Yarl’s Wood, every year. Detention is never good for women asylum seekers. Detained asylum seekers suffer much higher rates of depression, anxiety and PTSD than those who live in the community while their applications are assessed. None of this is surprising.

Yarl’s Wood staff is 52% male, 48% female, according to testimony before Parliament last year. So, the reports of routine violation of privacy and sexual intimidation and exploitation are also not surprising. All of this is part of the design of a program that imprisons women who seek help.

Margaret fled the DRC, ended up in the UK, applied for asylum: “We arrived at midnight. And I saw it was a prison. I came here only just to ask asylum, I’m not a criminal. I am so depressed that they think I am going to kill myself here and I am watched by men and women night and day. When the men watch me it makes me have so many bad feelings about myself and my body. I feel full of shame about what happened to me and what is happening to me. Being in prison here is a torture in my head.”

Margaret now has refugee status in the United Kingdom. What exactly is the investment the State has made in driving Margaret mad? What good can possibly come from such a policy? None. Repeatedly, current and former prisoners of Yarl’s Wood describe the programmatic assault on their humanity, and they wonder, “What good can from a policy of dehumanizing women?” None.

The only good is from those women who are organizing to smash this system. The report ends with a straightforward message: TOGETHER WE ARE STRONG: CAMPAIGNING TO END DETENTION ACROSS THE UK. Women Asylum Seekers Together Manchester organize with Aderonke Apata to shut down Yarl’s Wood and beyond. Embrace in Stoke-on-Trent is doing likewise. Why Refugee Women, in Bradford, was organized by Beatrice Botomani, a former detainee. There’s Hope Projects, in Birmingham, and the London Refugee Women’s Forum. And there’s Women for Refugee Women, and in particular, the #SetHerFree campaign, launched by former Yarl’s Wood prisoners, Meltem Avcil and Lydia Besong.

Women refusing to be silent, speaking and shouting and dancing in the streets, halls, corridors, meeting rooms, classrooms and everywhere else – that’s the real story here. While it’s not surprising to those who know anything about women’s social justice work, across the centuries, it’s still a welcome astonishment. Women asylum seekers ask for haven and shelter, but they know that TOGETHER THEY ARE STRONG, and they will tear down the walls of Yarl’s Wood. And that will be only the beginning of the real asylum process. Setting them free is a next step in setting us all free. Set her free. Set us free.

 

(Image Credit: flickr.com)

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I hear the banging of the doors and the sound of their keys

February 3, 2014 by 14 Comments

Women for Refugee Women’s latest report, Detained: Women Asylum Seekers Locked Up in the UK is hard and all too familiar reading. Women seek asylum because they have been tortured, raped, persecuted, and they are imprisoned and tortured anew.

Over 85% of the women interviewed said they had been raped or tortured. Over 50% said they had been persecuted for the crime of being a woman. Close to 20% said they had been persecuted for being lesbians. Almost all the women described despair at and depression in detention. More than half had contemplated suicide. About a third had been on suicide watch while in immigration prison. Around 40% of women asylum seekers who have been detained have spent more than a month behind bars. Almost all the women said male staff had guarded them. Half of the women said male staff had verbally abused them.

And then there’s this: “Home Office statistics released for this report show that of the 1,867 women who had sought asylum and who left detention in 2012, only 674, or 36%, were removed from the UK. The others were released into the UK. Our research suggests that this unnecessary detention has an ongoing impact on the mental health of vulnerable women.”

Here’s how Cameroonian asylum seeker Lydia Besong, a two-time resident of Yarl’s Wood and now a formally acknowledged refugee, describes “ongoing impact”: “When I left detention, Yarl’s Wood followed me to Manchester. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a trance, I feel I hear the footsteps of the officers, I hear the banging of the doors and the sound of their keys. Even though I’m out of detention, I’m not really out – I still have those dreams.”

Alice, a Cameroonian lesbian, experienced “appalling sexual violence” in Cameroonian prisons. When she was hauled off and thrown into prison in the UK, those experiences returned, with a vengeance: “There is no law in detention. You feel that the guards apply the law according to their mood and prejudices. They inflict their own feelings on the women in there and there is nothing to stop them. Yarl’s Wood is a lawless place … I would honestly die rather than go back to Yarl’s Wood. I know these people are doing a job but at times it seems as if they are actually bad people who have stopped regarding us as human beings. I have told this story because I want this treatment of women to stop. I don’t want others to go through what I went through. I am still trying to recover from what happened to me not only in Cameroon but in Yarl’s Wood.”

Story after story, history is a nightmare from which she is trying to awake.  Yarl’s Wood is filled to choking with law: the law of State violence, torture and terror. Meltem Avcil knows of the terror and the law. In 2007, at the age of 13, she, and her mother, were locked up in Yarl’s Wood for three months. At that time she had lived in England for six years. As far as Avcil knew, she was a British schoolgirl. Then the State came to teach her a lesson: “They knocked on the door so hard. Even now, if I hear the door knocked so hard, I panic. My best friend was sleeping over. Eight men surrounded a house of three women and dragged us out.”

In 2010, Avcil organized the campaign to end the detention of immigrant children. Now she’s organizing to end the detention of women asylum seekers. She’s started a petition: “Every year, hundreds of women who come to this country to seek safety from persecution are being detained in Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire.  Research by Women for Refugee Women shows that the majority of these women say they have experienced rape, sexual violence and torture in their home countries. The impact of detention on women is devastating. Many become depressed and suicidal. These women have not committed any crime, and yet they are being locked up indefinitely. We are asking you to ensure the government stops detaining women who have come to this country to seek asylum. Women’s asylum cases can be considered while they live in the community. We are also asking you to ensure that no male staff are employed at Yarl’s Wood detention centre in roles where they come into contact with women, and that allegations of abuse made against staff are properly investigated. It’s possible to create an asylum process which treats women who have survived rape and torture with dignity and humanity. They deserve a fair hearing and a chance to rebuild their lives.”

You can sign the petition here. Women deserve a fair hearing and a chance to build and rebuild their lives.

 

(Image Credit: Women for Refugee Women)

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