Thoughts of a Visitor

I met an elderly friend while out walking this morning. ‘How are your poor people in detention’, she asked, ‘I am worrying about them’. I explained that the Corona virus had emptied the centres but they were now filling up again. She asked her question before enquiring about my family and it showed she understood the detainee’s plight was so much more serious than that of my stressed but fortunate family. How come this question is not being repeated across this country?

 It is nearly a quarter of a century since I first started visiting detainees at Gatwick and wonder why so little has changed and whose failure is it that I still need to do it? Is it because not enough people care that men and women are held indefinitely in detention without judicial oversight and that more than half are simply released again? Is it because of a climate of fear and distrust of ‘the stranger’? Is it because there has been a noticeable shift to the political right in the last few years? We were nearly there, eighteen months ago when there was a chance to get a change to the legislation and bring an end to indefinite detention. The vagaries of Brexit have finished that and now it feels as if everything has slipped back twenty years.

 This may sound hopeless and I would not be honest if I did not frequently feel low about the prospects for those seeking a safe legal home in this country. However, volunteering with Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group and Refugee Tales always brings hope and positivity. As a visitor, hope is what you give, as there is little else to offer when you sit opposite a distressed stranger in the visits room. Such hope has to be honest and constructive and built one day, one week at a time.

 The fact that a public enquiry into the Panorama programme is happening at all is important. It will shine a light into so much that is wrong with the detention estate, but it will not answer the basic question as to what is wrong with detention itself. That is why the Walking Enquiry means so much to me. It is a chance to get the word out, to say to anyone who will listen that you cannot lock people up indefinitely without affect. The long lasting mental and physical damage to individuals and families, the waste of potential, the abuse of international law, all this has to be debated and shown for what it is, a scandal.

 Any way that the powerful testimony of those who have been detained and those who defend and support them can be shared is a step towards a national outcry for detention to be used only minimally with judicial oversight and in clearly defined circumstances.

—by Mary B.