Something about the Children Act principle of 'the best interests of the child' eludes this Government. So fixated is it on a macho performance over immigration that it is locking up child asylum seekers, subjecting them to dawn raids and even putting them in handcuffs.
Sixteen immigration officials swooped at dawn on a family of asylum seekers from Kosovo in Glasgow, and handcuffed one of the children. Their action provoked Children's Commissioner Kathleen Marshall to protest. The children's schoolfriends protested too, and so did the Scottish Parliament, which will lobby the Home Office on the treatment of child asylum seekers.
The Government has tried to justify its treatment of these children on the grounds that there aren't many of them. And in any case, argues the Home Office, they remain only briefly incarcerated in the 'removal centres' - the newly-minted name for detention centres, intended to remind the inmates that their destination is one way: out.
So, the defence is that the children's trauma will be short and sharp. The Government claims these arrangements help to target people likely to abscond.
But the Refugee Council, which is part of a coalition of asylum and children's organisations campaigning against the immigration regulations, reports that there is no evidence to support the absconder theory. Far from being few, the council calculates that about 2,000 children are being locked up every year. They've committed no crime, but still they attract treatment that is 'unnecessary, expensive and inhumane'.
To pull all this off, the UKGovernment has had to exempt itself from some of the conditions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child - a convention which exists precisely to protect the most vulnerable children in the world. Who else should be guarded, if not children fleeing from war and torture?
The Government also claims that it is best for the children to be with their parents - even if that means being locked up, denied education and, most of all, deprived of any assessment of their needs as children. This is the ultimate objectification. These children exist only as annexes of their unwelcome parents.
Could it be that the Government is punishing the children as a way to control their parents? Now, that's something to boast about, isn't it?
