Philadelphia, New York, London.
Yarl’s Wood Immigation Removal Centre aka Detention Centre aka Detention Hell
and their website is horrific:
http://www.yarlswood.co.uk/Former Yarl’s Wood Detainee Calls For An End To Detention Hell
“WE did not know they were coming for us. Nobody ever knows they are coming.”
Meltem Avcil’s voice wavers as she describes the moment when, in the early hours of August 27, 2007, she and her mother were ‘dragged’ from their Doncaster home and bundled into the back of a van by immigration officers.
“They knocked hard on the door; a terrifying noise. Even now if I hear a loud bang I start shaking,” she says.
Meltem (pictured) was just 13 years old when she was taken to Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre on the outskirts of Clapham.
Now she is 20, a mechanical engineeering student at Kingston University, and campaigning to end the detention of women seeking asylum in the UK - beginning with Yarl’s Wood.
“Whatever they try to call it, any place where they search you at the gates, give you an ID card and lock metal gate after metal gate after you is a prison,” she says of the centre she lived in for 91 days.
On Thursday, she brought her fight to the Government’s doorstep in a peaceful protest outside the Home Office in Marsham Street, London. She was joined by human rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti and refugee charities including Women for Refugee Women.
Back in 2010, Meltem’s story moved the coalition to act after they pledged not to detain the children of asylum seekers.
Her ultimate goal is to put an end detention full stop. But first she is calling for women to be removed from Yarl’s Wood (‘step by step,’ she says).
Since opening in 2000, the centre has been mired in controversy including the fire of 2001 and most recently the dismissal of two guards who sexually abused a female detainee. “Alot of people ask if I am sexist by only campaigning for women,” Meltem says, “but my reply is, of course not. What I know is, for a woman, being in detention is like being in hell”.
A report released last month by Women for Refugee Women, spoke to 46 women who had been detained, the majority in Yarl’s Wood, and found 93 per cent of women felt depressed in detention; 61 per cent thought about killing themselves; and more than one in five had attempted suicide.
More than 85 per cent of the women said they had been raped or tortured before arriving in the UK.
Meltem’s Kurdish family was forced to flee their home in Turkey when she was just four years old.
She travelled to Germany with her parents, where they were refused asylum; they then travelled to the UK, where her parents split up, and she remained with her mother. “After that we lived peacefully in Doncaster until the night they came for us,” she says.
Her message is clear: allow asylum seekers to live in the community they seek sanctuary from while cases - which can take years to be decided - are resolved.
Innocent until proven guilty.
The Detained report also showed that just 36 per cent of women who sought asylum and placed in detention centres were then removed from the UK. The others were either granted leave to remain, or continued their cases while living in the community. Watching her mother endure the experience of detention was enough to convince Meltem that something had to change.
“I had a choice to pretend everything was fine or do something about it. I chose to do something about it.”
In an open letter to Theresa May, which accompanies her petition for change, Meltem makes her plea: ‘It’s possible to create an asylum process which treats women who have survived rape and torture with dignity and humanity’.
Sign the petition at www.change.org/refugeewomen
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