Quaker campaigners have warned Friends that they must keep up pressure on ministers who have promised to end child detention in immigration centres. The Quaker Asylum and Refugee Network (QARN) also insisted that the policy should not lead to children being separated from their parents.
Representatives of QARN made the points at a special interest gathering during Britain Yearly Meeting (BYM).

QARN’s Sheila Mosley told Friends that when the government had announced an end to child detention, campaigners had experienced ‘quite a euphoria – for a couple of minutes’. She said that subsequent developments had made them worried.

Immigration minister Damien Green declared an immediate end to the detention of children at Dungavel in Scotland, but some of the inmates were moved to the Yarl’s Wood detention centre. Sheila Morley said that these included a mother with an 8-month-old baby, who endured a 9-hour journey in the back of a van. Officials are reported to have told the mother that if she refused then she and her baby would be transported separately.

Several Friends expressed fear that ministers would fulfil their promise by moving the children into foster care, thus separating them from their parents and creating more trauma for both. QARN is working against this possibility. Sheila Mosley suggested it is important to remind politicians that the evidence shows that families with children are unlikely to abscond if allowed out of detention centres.

QARN’s Elizabeth Coleman spoke of the group’s concern to be faithful to the Quaker testimony of equality. She argued that economic inequalities, both within and between countries, are the underlying reasons for the conditions that lead people to need asylum. She insisted that ‘there is a need to change the system, not only help individuals’.

Later, when giving the Meeting for Sufferings (MfS) report to BYM, Susan Seymour welcomed the government’s announcement on child detention, but insisted that Quakers are ‘going to be watching to make sure they keep their promise’.