Solidarity with women* in detention!

Today, Sunday 24 November 2024, on this day of action against violence against women* and gender minorities, a group of activists gathered outside the Holsbeek women’s detention centre (in the Leuven region). The aim of the action was to express solidarity with the women locked up in the centre, and to denounce the violence they suffer on a daily basis in their administrative procedures, in their situation of imprisonment and in their migration journey.

Opened in 2019, the Holsbeek’s centre for women is the first detention centre for single women living in a so-called ‘illegal’ situation, pending deportation by the Immigration Office to their ‘country of origin’. With around fifty places, the centre currently holds more than twenty women. It is also important to remember that other women are also imprisoned in special wings of the Bruges and Caricole detention centres.

Those who visited Holsbeek today were able to come into direct contact with the inmates, who were together in the refectory for lunch. The group sent out messages of support and courage, and the women locked up were able to share a few things, such as their names, their stories and their situations. They have been locked up for varying lengths of time, sometimes for as long as ten months. Some of them are pregnant, others in a critical state of health.

We share the press release issued by the group organising the demonstration:

On Sunday 24 November, several dozen activists gathered outside the Holsbeek detention centre for women, near Leuven. As thousands of people marched through the streets of Brussels to denounce sexist and sexual violence, the activists present wished to express their solidarity with the women detained and denounce the racist policies of detention and deportation.

Through this action, the activists are also trying to highlight the links between the violence perpetrated against women and LGBTQIA+ people, and the violence engendered by migration policies and confinement. The realities of women prisoners are all too often absent from the feminist agenda. Yet these women suffer from a wide range of oppressions.

There is a great deal of gender-based violence before, during and after the migration process: forced marriage, mutilation, rape, forced prostitution, persecution on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity, administrative violence, police violence, and so on. And this violence does not stop at the gates of Europe. Through its policies of refusing to receive undocumented migrants, detaining them and deporting them, the Belgian state is keeping the people concerned in a vulnerable and precarious position.

Detention, whether in a closed centre or in prison, affects both the detainees and their families psychologically and physically. Deportations are intrinsically violent, but their brutality is amplified by the institutional system that accompanies them. Testimonies of police violence and gender-based or even sexual violence are almost systematic. As a former woman detained at the Holsbeek detention centre put it: “There is police violence at the airport, women are suffocated, women have their veils ripped off because they are Muslims, women have their support ripped off because they are women, and they are suffocated, their heads and necks are sat on, it’s not normal!”

The Holsbeek detention centre was inaugurated in 2019, as part of a master plan to significantly increase the Belgian government’s detention capacity. There are currently six detention centres in Belgium. Two other construction projects are still on the agenda: one in Jumet (near Charleroi), and the other in Zandvliet (near Antwerp).

While the detainees are resisting in their own way from inside, groups of undocumented migrants are also mobilising outside. The Comité des femmes sans-papiers (Undocumented Women’s Committee) is fighting for the regularisation and visibility of their situation:

“Violence against women is sometimes the reason why women migrate. The migration process is also littered with violence. Believing they are protected in Belgium, women find themselves undocumented, vulnerable and therefore exposed to all kinds of violence and abuse. In Belgium, violence against undocumented women is not well known to the public. In most cases, the violence is institutional, familial, marital, psychological, physical, etc. While every year on 25 November, the whole of humanity condemns violence against women, the violence experienced by undocumented women remains unknown, so nobody talks about it.”

According to the protesters present in Holsbeek on Sunday, who are demanding freedom of movement and settlement for all, the detention of people without papers must end: “The detention system reproduces colonial and racist logics of hierarchisation between human beings, of sorting out those who have the ‘right’ papers”.

Freedom for women*, Freedom for all!