More than 30 women have been on hunger strike in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, demanding justice and legal rights and in protest against ongoing sexual abuse. On 1 October, six of the women were deported, four of whom have witnessed and experienced sexual abuse at the hands of officers in the Serco-run centre. It will now be near-impossible to hear evidence from the women who were forced onto a charter flight to Pakistan, in what seems a deliberate attempt to silence them. The women who remain at Yarl’s Wood continue their hunger strike.
A statement, signed by nine women two days before the deportation, protests against ‘charter flights, deportation, no right of appeal in fresh claims and even sexual abuse’. They demand the right of appeal and the right to bail and ask ‘Why are we discriminated against by UKBA [UK Border Agency] and other institutions. We are not street dogs’. They go on to say that they cannot access legal aid. Memoona Rashid, a lawyer from Pakistan and one of the women detained, said ‘women must have time to present our cases and gather evidence. We have not had access to lawyers because of a huge waiting list which is due to the mass round-up of people. The legal clinic is deliberately slow – we are being denied due process and justice’. Rashid called the removal of the women ‘mass deportation’.
The protest is of course not just about the removal of witnesses, but against the routine brutality at the hands of the British state and their private contractors. Companies include Serco and Tascor, responsible for driving the women across the country in the middle of the night to an undisclosed airport. Pakistani asylum-seekers are regularly deported by charter flight. Since February 2012, at least one plane a month has removed 50-85 people per plane to Pakistan, heavily guarded by private security guards and under instruction by UKBA. One of the women held in Yarl’s Wood and threatened with deportation, Amina Rafique, was able to fight her removal after a successful community campaign.
The background to the hunger strike and deportation is one of systematic sexual abuse, revealed by four women who have spoken out. The first woman, called ‘Tanja’ in press reports, was held in Yarl’s Wood from the 10 August 2012 to 20 March this year. She explains: ‘I said I was scared and I did not want to … There were two occasions when I was made to do “blow jobs” when I did not want to. [The guard] was well aware that I did not want to.” She exposed the wider culture of harassment, describing how the officers would touch women and ‘choose younger girls, the most vulnerable. They do whatever they want.’ She was pressured by officers to withdraw the complaint, but continued to speak out and offer evidence. The UKBA responded there was ‘sufficient evidence to suggest that [three officers] did behave in the unprofessional way that you allege’, and continue to insist that the abuse was consensual.
Three more women came forward to support the allegations and to reveal the abuse they had witnessed and suffered. Tanja’s lawyer, Harriet Wistrich, describes the cases as the ‘tip of the iceberg’; it has been repeated in various statements that abuse is ongoing, and women fear deportation if they speak out, or are deported before they are able to complain. A demonstration called by the All African Women’s Group, Black Women’s Rape Action Project & Women Against Rape in support of the women have made it clear that the systematic abuse is not such a shock to the authorities: ‘Sexual and racist abuse and other violence by guards have prompted regular protests, even hunger strikes, by women detained in Yarl’s Wood. The same names of guards having sex with women in their care come up over and again. It appears to be so widespread that it is impossible for the authorities, including the Home Office, not to have known about it until it was publicly exposed. Women have been deported without the alleged rape being investigated – a cover up?’ They are demanding a full public inquiry and that no more witnesses should be deported.
Deportation, and systematic sexual abuse, is evidence of the brutality women seeking refuge and safety face. They say: ‘Please we need justice, we need safety and we need protection. Women seeking asylum from gender violence, honour killing, forced marriage, domestic abuse, trafficking need time to prove their cases.’ The women’s statement and hunger strike are resistance to such inhumanity, and they remain defiant:
‘Asking for justice is not a crime.
We want independence.
We want our rights.
We want to raise our voice in public …’
No to deportations! No to abuse! Solidarity with the women in Yarl’s Wood!
