The scandal of child detention in the UK
"We were sleeping and the officer came. It was scary and Mum was crying."
"I didn’t think it was real, not real life."
"They were bashing and kicking the door."
“It’s not nice going to the toilet in front of an officer."
"They broke our
house."
These comments are drawn from the Children’s Commissioner’s interviews with young children arrested and detained for immigration purposes in the UK.
Since late 2009 OurKingdom has run dozens of pieces, collected here, illuminating the UK’s appalling policy of arresting and detaining children in conditions known to harm their mental health.
You can find them all here, the most recent at the top, including our exposées of how the facts are covered up and the deeper significance of such official mendacity.
Much of this journalism has sprung from the unfunded End Child Detention Now campaign whose journalism is led by Clare Sambrook, now a co-editor here. Clare’s articles for OurKingdom were prominent among those that won her the 2010 Paul Foot Award and the Anthony Bevins Prize for outstanding investigative journalism.
Child detention goes on (albeit on a smaller scale) regardless of the Coalition’s promise to end it, as you can see from our most recent coverage. We continue to expose it and the way state officials, the private companies and government spokesmen dissimulate and mislead the British people about what is being done to vulnerable children in our name.
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