Freedom from Torture's Reaction to Channel 4 Yarl's Wood expose

C4's allegations of the treatment of vulnerable individuals at Yarl's Wood are shocking and should make the Home Office take a hard look at options for removing the contract from Serco.

However there is a wider issue that the majority of those in Yarl's Wood and elsewhere in immigration detention are asylum seekers who have fled human rights violations, violence and conflict in their home countries. These are vulnerable and traumatised individuals whose detention is for administrative convenience and no other reason. In particular we treat a number of torture survivors who have been wrongly detained under the immigration rules and our clinicians have found that their rehabilitation has been adversely affected by detention.

The issues at Yarl's Wood must be addressed urgently but so must the screening process that fails to identify survivors of torture who are by the government's own standards deemed unsuitable for detention.