Shut Down Yarl’s Wood and All Immigration Detention Centres!!!

Feminist Fightback, All African Women’s Group and Black Women’s Rape Action Project are calling for a picket of the Serco Research Institute on 8 March 2008 at 4:30 pm.

Serco is the company that owns Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre where up to 405 women, children and men seeking asylum are detained at any time.  Legal Action for Women found that 70% of those detained reported being survivors of rape.   Women and their families are held in appalling conditions, and describe being subject to racist and sexist physical and verbal abuse.  They also state that the food served is inadequate, and that necessary items are sold at extortionate prices. Women have also complained that staff members have interfered with their attempts to contact their lawyers. 

Despite their ordeals, women in Yarl’s Wood are fighting back.  In May 2007, many women including over 91 families, went on hunger strike to protest against this abuse.  Despite attempting to end the strike through intimidation, Serco were forced to agree to some of the women’s demands, including investigating why women were not receiving their 71p/day government allowance.  Over a hundred women also signed a letter to Gordon Brown, reporting the abuse to which they’d been subject, and appealing for amnesty.   Most recently, 22 women risked serious reprisals to sign a letter demanding an immediate impartial and independent investigation into the conditions at Yarl’s Wood.  Women struggle every day to resist - often very violent - attempts to send them back to the violence they fled.

• The women in Yarl’s Wood should be free to celebrate International Women’s Day with us!

• We call for the immediate closing of Yarl’s Wood and all Immigration Removal Centres, and an end to the criminalisation of all who have survived rape and other torture.

• We will no longer tolerate Serco, or any other private company profiting from the oppression & misery of others.

Information in this flyer provided by:

Black Women’s Rape Action Project, Legal Action for Women,

BBC & Home Office.