For years, the UK government has knowingly harmed between 1,000 and 2,000 children of asylum-seekers a year, sending dawn hit squads to raid family homes, to search children in their beds and lock them up (sometimes for weeks and months) in places known to harm their mental and physical health. All in the name of ‘border control’, driven by a political desire to look tough on immigration — and executed in venal disregard of a startling truth that the UK Border Agency let slip in evidence to Parliament last year: absconding is not an issue.

The citizens’ campaign End Child Detention Now has gathered some of the compelling research that the Home Office has variously ignored, misrepresented and buried these past five years. The research provides irrefutable evidence of damage done to children by detention and by other harmful and state-sanctioned practices.

Clare Sambrook, coordinator of End Child Detention Now, gathers five years of evidence that the Home Office has variously ignored, badmouthed and buried. Read the dossier here >>>