Children's Commissioner condemns treatment of detained children

Detaining children in an immigration detention centre is "extremely distressing and harmful", according to a highly critical report on the conditions in the Yarl's Wood Immigration centre published by the Children's Commissioner for England. The report highlights a number of problems in the Yarl's Wood centre where more than 1,000 children are held every year. These include a failure to assess "even at an elementary level" the general psychological wellbeing of a child on arrival and a failure to recognise psychological harm when faced with dramatic changes in a child's behaviour. The UK Border Agency dismissed the report as "misguided and wrong" and insisted that they take the detention of families "very seriously" and use it only as a last resort. In response to the findings, Donna Covey, Chief Executive of the UK Refugee Council, said that: "These are children we are talking about. It is unacceptable that they are detained at all. Even if all the Commissioner's recommendations about procedure were followed to the letter, there is no escaping the harm that is caused by locking children up."

Source: ECRE Weekly Bulletin, 19 February 2010

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