Meer over de 120 vrouwen in hongerstaking in Britse deportatiegevangenis Yarl’s Wood

More than 100 women in Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre have gone on hunger strike over “inhumane” conditions at the facility. Around 120 female detainees began their protest on Wednesday, urging the Home Office to end “offensive” practices which they said leave people “breaking down psychologically” after being detained for immigration reasons. Women taking part in the strike told The Independent they had “given up thinking about the outside world” due to uncertainty over being locked up indefinitely, saying the centre was “failing” to meet their health needs. One said she was “struggling to find a reason to go on” (…) Asylum seekers and other migrants are sent to Yarl’s Wood and other immigration detention centres when the Government wishes to establish their identities or facilitate their immigration claims, not because they have committed criminal offences. The centre holds adult women and adult family groups who are subject to immigration control. The latest figures show 410 people are detained there. One Algerian woman taking part in the strike, who was detained three months ago after living in the UK since the age of 11, told The Independent she felt she was being “broken down” by the system. She said: “Every day I wake up and I have to think of a reason to go on. I’ve given up thinking about the outside – I’ve given up thinking about it. I feel like I’m in someone’s dungeon and no one is letting me out. I might as well be blindfolded in a van going 100 miles an hour in a direction I don’t know. The indefinite detention causes people so much stress. People are breaking down psychologically. We have no fight left. They break you down. It’s inhumane.”

May Bulman in More than 100 women in Yarl’s Wood detention centre go on hunger strike over ‘inhumane’ conditions (Independent)