In an anonymous post, a detainee at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre writes: “I know if something wrong happens to me, it will not bother the Home Office as I, along with all other detainees, are just numbers for them rather than human beings.”
The issue of immigration detention is a sensitive and complex one, often overshadowed by policies and statistics. Looking beyond this narrative and paying closer attention to the experiences of those affected reveals the impact of these structural processes on people’s lives, especially for women who are detained within UK Immigration Removal Centres. My recent article sheds light on the particular difficulties and vulnerabilities that women encounter in this system.
Immigration detention was first legitimised in UK law by the Aliens Act 1920, however its use did not become widespread until the 1990s. Since then, there has been a significant expansion in the use of detention to impose stricter and more forceful border measures in response to the perceived ‘problem’ of immigration. These immigration detention and deportation practices in the UK have drawn critical attention from academic and activist circles in the wake of the expanding immigration detention regime of the 2000s.
Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) in the UK hold people who are subject to immigration control in custody before they are released back into the community, or deported or removed from the country. It is an administrative process, not a criminal procedure, and therefore people in detention face no judge, no court and no time limit on their stay.
Yarl’s Wood IRC is one of seven IRCs in the UK and can be considered distinct in that it has predominantly detained women. The centre has been the subject of considerable political and media attention as high-profile reports of racist and sexual abuse, mistreatment and poor living conditions have emerged, and much of the campaigning around immigration detention in the UK has thus centred on the women there.
Many women detained within Yarl’s Wood IRC have engaged in acts of resistance and protest to bring attention from the public and the media to their treatment and living conditions. They have organised hunger strikes which have been a powerful tool for expressing dissent. By refusing food, they demand justice for themselves and other detainees. By protesting within the confines of Yarl’s Wood IRC, these women not only reclaim their agency but also contribute to a broader conversation about the need for abolition of the detention estate. These protests demonstrate the resilience and determination of these women who refuse to be reduced to numbers within a flawed immigration system.
While debates and activism about immigration detention often focus on detained women, in statistical terms this group makes up a small proportion of the detention population. Using the latest figures published by the Home Office, we can see that in the last three years less than four per cent of people in immigration detention were women. Over the last decade no more than 11 per cent of the population of the immigration detention estate were women. The experiences of men are therefore treated as the norm due to their majority status, despite evidence that women experience detention differently and are also typically held in separate facilities. Detained women are erased from the narrative and it is important to recognise not only the weight of these experiences as they are told, but also how they are told and by whom.
Pregnant women are subject to immigration detention despite a critical and systemic lack of gynaecological and obstetric medical care across a detention system which assumes its population to be biologically male. Highlighting reproductive injustice within immigration detention is not only a healthcare issue but also a call to acknowledge the dignity and agency of every woman, whatever her immigration status.
Pregnant women are a category who can only be held for 72 hours, or up to one week with the approval of a minister, according to Home Office guidance. Nevertheless, a commissioned assessment into the progress of these welfare changes found that pregnant women were still being detained unnecessarily. Some women may also be unaware of their pregnancy initially when entering detention. Those who are risk not being believed by staff as although their detention is administrative rather than criminal, detained women are assumed to be ‘illegal’ and deceptive. Medical Justice reports the story of a pregnant woman with a history of diabetes and high blood pressure who was detained at Yarl’s Wood IRC but the nurses refused to believe she was pregnant or allow her to test her blood sugar until she brought them the visual evidence of a miscarriage in a bucket.
The urgency of this work is evident when considering recent developments in migration governance within the UK. The Nationality and Borders Bill 2022 threatens to intensify an already violent and restrictive border regime, expanding the detention estate and increasingly detaining migrant women. A new immigration detention unit specifically for women, Derwentside IRC, has recently opened and has already faced significant criticism from campaigning groups, including an unsuccessful legal challenge on the basis of the lack of in-person legal advice. It is therefore crucial to spotlight the voices of these women to uncover the oppressive processes at work within the current immigration system and how it can be resisted.
Megan Crossley is a PhD researcher and Associate Lecturer at Lancaster University. She is now in the second year of her PhD project which uses photovoice methods to explore the experiences of people seeking asylum or with recent refugee status in North-West England. Her research is concerned with sociologies of migration and her primary research interests are refugees and the asylum system, gender, community-making and resistance.
Gendering detention: (re)producing vulnerability for migrant women in British Immigration Removal Centres by Megan Crossley for Justice, Power and Resistance is available on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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Image credit: Juan Carlos Trujillo via Unsplash