The last of three events linked to International Women’s Day I attended was a picket close to the offices of SERCO, organised by Feminist Fightback, All African Womens Group and Black Womens Rape Action Project. Unlike the Million Women Rise march, but as also the Dignity! Period rally, this involved both women and men.
Few people recognise the name SERCO, though increasingly around the world it is running their lives. Around the world, governments are turning to SERCO to run what used to be public services – hospitals, prisons, schools and even military services. Increasingly what used to be public is being sold off and run for profit. When they think of a way to charge for the air that you breathe, it will be SERCO – or another company like it – collecting the cash.
In the UK, if you go to prison it may be run by SERCO, and you will be taken there in a SERCO van. SERCO also own and run Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, where around 400 women and children seeking asylum are imprisoned.
Around 70% of the women at Yarl’s Wood at any time claim they are survivors of rape. Conditions are appalling, with inadequate food, racist and sexist abuse, and profiteering from the sale of essential items. Apparently SERCO were forced to investigate claims that women there weren’t getting the miniscule government allowance of 71p a day passed on to them, and according to the women they have at times been prevented from contacting their lawyers.
Women there have responded with hunger strikes as well as letters and petitions to Gordon Brown and others demanding investigation of their treatment.
SERCO have a Research Institute in London in a court off High Holborn, and a picket there after the Million Women Rise event on Saturday March 8.
Around 40 people turned up to demand the immediate closure of Yarl’s Wood and an end to the criminalisation of rape and torture survivors. They also called for an end to SERCO and other private companies profiting from the oppression and misery of others.
Detention centres such as Yarl’s Wood are in any case a nasty stain on British justice, going against all our long-held principles of fair trial and the opposition to arbitrary detention dating back at least to the time of Magna Carta, signed a short distance from where I live.
American Bar Memorial to Magna Carta, Runnemede (more pictures)
That such centres should so badly treat those held inside them for the profit of their shareholders is reminiscent of the worst days of the slave trade – the abolition of which we celebrated last year.
