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| Cover of the review |
The latest issue of Race & Class examines the consequences of
the co-option of charities and voluntary organisations within the immigration
detention market.
In 2010 the British government announced that
the outrage of child detention for immigration purposes was to end.
Simultaneously, however, it commissioned the opening of a new family detention
centre, CEDARS, which was to be run under novel governance arrangements by the
Home Office, private security company G4S and the children’s charity
Barnardo’s.
‘The business of child detention: charitable co-option, migrant
advocacy and activist outrage’, by Imogen Tyler, Nick Gill, Deirdre Conlon and
Ceri Oeppen, draws on focus group research, to investigate the response of
migrant advocacy groups to Barnardo’s role. In particular, the authors ask
whether the charity is seen as mitigating or legitimising the use of detention
against children as a border control mechanism. Has the neoliberal trend
towards the ‘professionalisation of dissent’ diminished political opposition to
immigration detention in Britain and the wider world?
