Clare Sambrook on what Parliament isn’t being told about children’s lives inside a UK detention centre
Back in October, a study by NHS paediatricians and psychologists, Lorek et al, found that babies and children were being harmed at Yarl’s Wood detention centre.
The doctors recorded children’s 'increased fear due to being suddenly placed in a facility resembling a prison', their weight loss and tummy pains, how older children were so stressed they wet their beds and soiled their pants.
The study related the photographing and the fingerprinting, the roll calls and the body searches, the ID cards that children must carry at all times, the ten locked doors between freedom and the family centre, the steep deterioration in parents' mental health and parenting abilities, the self-harm and the suicide attempts.
And the sex games. One father, ‘spontaneously complained that he had found his daughter in the center without any clothes on. His child explained that she had been encouraged to undress and play “sex games” instigated by another detained child.’
Another mother, ‘spontaneously commented on the sexualized behavior of children within the center’.
The doctors wrote, ‘the experience of detention, even for a relatively brief period of time, has a detrimental effect on the mental and physical health of children.’
Click on link to read Clare's article at OurKingdom/OpenDemocracy
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