‘”It is like … a different country without human rights”: Women in Immigration detention in Britain’

While detention and deportation are supposed to be part of an administrative process, they have become heavily penalised as a result of western securitisation agendas which increasingly associate international migration with various forms of insecurity (terrorism, riots and social unrest, criminality) felt by the nation-state and its general public. Thus commitments to respect, uphold and advance social justice and gender equality have been weakened if not removed. While Britain vaunts a set of policies to protect ‘Adults at risk in immigration detention’ (with particular mention of women), detention rules and practices have increased the vulnerability of women detainees and insecurities they experience. Through a review and analysis of recent UK government policies, rules and orders governing detention (viz. Detention Centre rules, Enforcement Instructions and Guidance and Detention Service Orders) and of evaluation and impact reports prepared by relevant statutory agencies and third sector organisations, this paper demonstrates that the securitisation and penalisation of migration have aggressively disrupted the intimacies of women detainees’ daily life in order to counter perceived threats, and have systematically undermined efforts to reduce the insecurities and protection of women detainees and increase gender justice. It contends that in the context of indefinite detention policy and practice and the operation of a detention estate which can justifiably be judged as inhumane and undignified particularly in relation to the some of most vulnerable of detainees, the UK government’s immigration detention policies and rules flout the 2010 Equality Act and its requirement that public bodies have a legal duty to protect people against discrimination on grounds of gender among others. The paper concludes that attempts to increase gender equality within the punitive and discriminatory spaces of immigration detention, will necessarily fail as long as the construction of migrant women as unworthy, undeserving, less than human and potentially criminal, rooted in Britain’s colonial past, remains implicitly embedded in detention policy and practice.