Hitting the right note

Thirty thousand people are detained in Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs) across the UK every year. Being detained is a psychologically damaging experience, not because the regimes are brutal, but because it’s hard to accept imprisonment when it is not punishment for a crime. Detention may last days or years, the term is indefinite and the subsequent outcome unknown. Most detainees are asylum seekers or foreign nationals who have done time in UK prisons, and most of them have troubled or traumatic histories. Just one night in detention changes your life. Depression, anxiety, self harm and suicidal thoughts are common. Detainees are doubly isolated from the community – by the fact of their incarceration and by a wider silence and ignorance about the detention system. There is no shortage of public debate about asylum and migration, but the human reality seldom comes through. And the centres, like other closed institutions, are not well understood in their local areas.
Music In Detention (MID) uses music to help people cope with immigration detention and to improve relationships in IRCs. Through making music, we feel more human and – crucially – see others as more human. MID aims to break the silence about immigration detention and to include detainees in the wider community. We run participative music workshops in detention centres, and are the only organisation in the UK delivering sustained arts activity in IRCs. Over the past year we have run 105 days of workshops with 2,600 people in and around nine centres, and have made music a regular feature in five (soon to be six) of them. Singing and percussion work are staple ingredients because they are accessible and universal – everyone can join in and the group can achieve a lot in short time.

It has its challenges, however. You can’t book participants, so you find out numbers, ages, nationalities on the day. Plans need to be flexible, and people often come and go through the course of a workshop. The mood can change in the course of a day, and removals and removal notices produce an instant change in the atmosphere. We have worked in the past year with people from at least 40 countries, and this diversity gives our music vitality and creates striking blends. We often find individuals with real experience and ability from the start, while others slowly reveal their capabilities. Forgetting and shutting off emotion seems common in detention, but detainees’ emotions need an outlet, and this need is channelled into music of great power. The work also helps detainees to reaffirm their cultural identity, which detention can undermine.
We are now starting to develop ways of reaching beyond the IRCs. The music we create with detainees and local people provides us with a powerful way to bring detainees’ experiences and stories out into society and into the cultural mainstream. We aim to achieve attitudinal change with people who would not respond to campaigns, or even notice them. By raising awareness of what IRCs do and about the people held in them, and by understanding something of their lives, feelings and aspirations, we aim to make immigration detention impossible to hide or ignore.