Immigration Detention (Victims of Torture)

Jess Phillips Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)]

It is, as always, a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Sharma. It will not surprise anybody that I wish to join in this debate to talk about my experiences of detained women who have been victims of torture, gender-based violence, sexual violence, female genital mutilation, abuse—anything that can be thought of that happens to us women. I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) on tenaciously and consistently fighting for these people. The Minister should recognise, after a few weeks of being in front of her, that she will not give up.

I associate myself with everything that my right hon. Friend said about the adults at risk policy. That policy specifically states that survivors of sexual or gender-based violence are recognised as “at risk” and so are unsuitable for detention, yet anybody who ever visited Yarl’s Wood would know that the majority of women in there have certainly suffered gender-based violence, sexual violence or domestic abuse.

I went to Yarl’s Wood about a year and a half ago to visit a woman who I knew to have been a victim. She was in Yarl’s Wood regardless of the fact that she had been a victim of quite horrendous trafficking and abuse. I do not know whether it was just because these people knew I was coming, but by the time I got there, they had released her, so I went to speak to another woman, who had nobody visiting her—I went back round through the security.

I am not entirely sure what training the Home Office is getting, but as somebody who was trained as a first responder for human trafficking and modern slavery and as such was allowed to refer into the Home Office’s system, it took me one minute to identify that this woman I had never met before was a victim of human trafficking. I did that by talking to her and asking her about her experiences—it was not difficult. I had no doubt that this woman was somebody I could easily have acted as a first responder for to get her into the national referral mechanism for modern slavery in this country. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind, yet there she was, in Yarl’s Wood, surrounded by people who were meant to have assessed her.

[Kate Green]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for drawing attention particularly to the situation of women and, indeed, men who have been trafficked, because there is plenty of evidence that being in detention makes it harder for those individuals to receive the expert support and advice that they need, to be able to build up trust to report the experiences that they have had to the authorities and therefore to access the national referral mechanism. As long as we put people in detention, we make another part of the system that is supposed to protect them even less likely to be effective.

[Jess Phillips]

My hon. Friend is exactly right, and the matter of trust between the different agencies is something that I shall come on to; in fact, that is the main focus of my speech. I could give hon. Members endless evidence from Women for Refugee Women. I have with me case study upon case study of women who had suffered FGM, been forced into prostitution, managed to escape and ended up in Yarl’s Wood. None of them ever seemed to have rule 35 laid out to them—and if they did, that was after two weeks of being detained.

I need not go through all the stories; I am sure that the Minister is very familiar with the issues and I will gladly send her every single one of the case studies. I want to talk mainly about how the Home Office is not only not assessing the people it finds in detention, but actively seeking victims as low-hanging fruit, in its drive to get deportation numbers up. We have seen from the Windrush situation that there is a target culture that is undeniable—somebody got a big Brucie bonus for getting more people deported. We have seen what that has done to that community.

In my constituency, I was dealing with the case of a woman who was brought to this country on a spousal visa and was abused, tortured, kept locked up and prevented from being fed by her spouse and his family. When she escaped, she came to me, and I did all I could to ensure that her immigration was secured through the domestic violence rules that the Home Office lays out.

It used to be the Sojourner project—or “sojournay” for people who are not from Birmingham. Things were going absolutely fine. We often deal with these cases, and the Home Office agreed that it would put the appeals on hold while we were dealing with this woman’s case. There were some discrepancies. Her husband obviously denied what she had said, and the Home Office, for a spell, decided to agree with him, but we managed to get over that little hump in the road, and then he sent a letter to her family in Pakistan, threatening to kill them—his family in Pakistan would kill her family in Pakistan—and that he would kill her in the UK.

On receiving the letter, my constituent called the police; her brother told her what had happened, and she called the police. I do not necessarily know whether this fits into the fancy idea of torture, but I think that somebody threatening to kill a person’s entire family and them—it is a credible threat, because it is not the first time that they have tried to kill the person—is pretty torturous. The woman called the police. The next day, her neighbour, upset and frightened, called me and said, “She’s told us to call you; she said to call you as she was being taken away.” She was taken away to Yarl’s Wood. When she called the police for help because her life was in danger, the response that she got was that she was taken away to immigration detention.

I cannot think of anything that would make women who are desperate and at risk in this country more unlikely to call the police than the fact that they might be dragged off to immigration detention. It is not only that when this woman was taken to Yarl’s Wood, she was not assessed properly for vulnerabilities or how at risk she might be; they actively took a woman, knowing that her life was at risk. That is totally unacceptable.

As somebody who has dealt with many cases like that, I know that immigration detention and deportation is a tool used by perpetrators of violence and abuse, grooming gangs—you name it, it is used by pretty much every perpetrator I have ever met where immigration was involved in the case. The perpetrators say, “If you tell anyone, they’ll take you away,” and boy, haven’t we just colluded with the violent men in this country that we pretend we are trying to stop!

I thought, “Maybe this is an isolated case and it just happens to be in my constituency,” which I did think was a little odd, but it turns out that it is in no way an isolated case. A freedom of information request was made recently of every police force in the country. Of the 45 police forces asked about the practice of handing over victims’ details, more than half said that they did that; the rest either did not reply or did not give a clear yes or no. Currently, we have a situation in our country where immigration officers are specifically targeting victims who come forward to the police forces. There should be a Chinese wall between victims of abuse and violence, and immigration detention.

I will not read the list of names of migrant women with unstable immigration status who were murdered last year. I asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department,

“how many victims detailed in domestic homicide Reviews were classified as (a) migrant to the UK and (b) no recourse to public funds in the last three years.”

Unsurprisingly, although we share all sorts of information about who is in our custody, we do not collect that information centrally.

It is horrifying to think that people who are vulnerable and desperate, who have suffered all manner of torture, are still being failed by our immigration system when they come forward for help. It is criminal that we are handing over victims of violence into immigration detention centres. We do not even need to do an assessment, because we know; they have rung us up about rape, abuse and torture, whether at home or abroad. That we think the appropriate thing is to get on the phone to immigration detention is totally and utterly unacceptable. It is a massive breach of trust in this country that this is still happening.

Again, I associate myself with everything my right hon. Friend has said and the questions she put to the Minister. I want to know what plans the Home Office has to introduce proactive screening processes in the adult risk process; it has a proactive way of detaining people, as I have just outlined. How will the Home Office ensure that people are detained only for the shortest possible time, as the detention policy sets out? As has been said, why is it only the UK that does not have limits on immigration detention? I want to hear from the Minister about that.

I am sure the Home Office will get used to all the amendments that will be tabled to the Domestic Abuse Bill, because this Chinese wall will be in there. I will stand and ensure that no woman who ever rings up about being raped or having a threat to the life of her or her children, whether here or in a different country, ever ends up in Yarl’s Wood again. I will find every single woman that has happened to.

What plans does the Home Office have to look at different ways of dealing with this? The Corston report on women in prison should be a lodestar and touchstone. There are community organisations to which the Government could pay a tiny fraction of what they are currently paying to whoever it is these days—G4S or Serco, or perhaps it is Sodexo, which makes sausage rolls for hospitals and keeps prisoners safe. Such a range! Those community organisations would actually help these people.

I worked in a human trafficking service. I worked for years in community projects with women with unstable migration status. I can almost guarantee that our rates of return home were better than those of the current detention system, because we did not just send people back to a country with no support. We ensured that those choices were made in reasonable time and that the safest option, whether staying here or going back, was followed.

There is no energy going into looking at better community options for immigration detention, for both men and women. Yet, in every other area of criminal justice, we will see that community detentions have far better rates, are far cheaper and are much better for the human rights of the people involved. I will leave the Minister with that. I cannot ask enough times whether she will confirm for me that a victim of crime will never again be used just to inform our deportation numbers.