SAGE Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC Race & Class Copyright © 2014 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 56(1): 3–21 10.1177/0306396814531690 http://rac.sagepub.com The business of child detention: charitable co-option, migrant advocacy and activist outrage IMOGEN TYLER, NICK GILL, DEIRDRE CONLON and CERI OEPPEN Abstract: 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 called CEDARS. An acronym for Compassion, Empathy, Dignity, Approachability, Respect and Support, CEDARS is run under novel governance arrangements by the Home Office, private security company G4S and the children’s charity Barnardo’s. This article draws on focus group research with migrant advocacy groups, to examine the ways in which Barnardo’s’ role within CEDARS is variously imagined as mitigating and/or legitimating the use of detention as a border control mechanism. In particular we ask: what are the consequences of the co-option of charities and voluntary organisations within the immigration detention market? Has the neoliberal trend towards the ‘professionalisation of dissent’ diminished political opposition to immigration detention in Britain and the wider world? 1 Has humanitarian activism on behalf of migrants (unintentionally) contributed to the exponential growth of for-profit migrant detention markets? Keywords: Barnardo’s, Britain, child detention, CEDARS, commissioning, co- option, G4S, immigration detention, neoliberalism, third sector Imogen Tyler is a senior lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University and author of Revolting Subjects: social abjection and resistance in neoliberal Britain (Zed, 2013). Nick Gill is a senior lecturer in Human Geography at Exeter University. Deirdre Conlon is a lecturer in Critical Human Geography at the University of Leeds. Ceri Oeppen is a lecturer in Geography at Sussex University. 531690RAC 0 0 10.1177/0306396814531690Race & ClassTyler et al. research-article 2014 at University of Leeds on January 4, 2015 rac.sagepub.com Downloaded from