One More Card

	Children in Detention
	What needs to change
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	Dominic’s Story
	What Can I do?
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One More Card   

Thank you for taking action to end the detention of children this Christmas

"I saw bad things happening in prison and there was too much crying. It gave me terrible headaches and I felt sad."
Dominic Mwafulirwa Junior, detained in Yarl's Wood Detention Centre in 2009  

A big ‘Thank You’ to everyone who sent a Christmas Card to Phil Woolas, the Minister for Immigration, asking him to take immediate action to end the detention of children.  The campaign ran very successfully, created a lot of interest, and was featured in the press and on Christian radio programmes. 
Some of your Christmas cards elicited a written response from the UK Border Agency Public Correspondence Team.  Reading it, however, you might think that all is well.  In fact, very little has changed and until the Government takes action, children will continue to be held in detention. Here are a few of the recent research findings from the Save the Children report, No Place for a Child:

• Current UK Border Agency practice holds children in detention for lengthy periods, and many of them are traumatised.
  
  
• Children in detention frequently experience mental health problems, which may include depression, changes in behaviour and confusion.  Some children refuse to eat, and are unable to sleep.
  
  
• Although there is some educational provision, in Yarlswood Detention Centre, these children experience nothing less than imprisonment, fear and anxiety, and their schooling is inevitably seriously disrupted.

Your Christmas Card action coincided with parliamentary questions on the subject to the Home Secretary (14th Dec); a strongly worded condemnation of the practice by leading children’s authors (10th Dec), and a plea from a coalition of royal medical colleges in London that children’s health and wellbeing should take precedence over UKBA administrative convenience.  Visit our website, and read about Citizens for Sanctuary and Outcry. Our campaigning will continue until the practice of detaining children is history.  More information to come.  

Refresh your memory by downloading the original campaign ask (PDF)