Some Somali parents living in Finland have sent their children to disciplinary institutions in Somalia where the youngsters are subjected to severe treatment, such as being shackled with chains and beaten, an Yle investigation has found.
Wali Hashi, a journalist attached to Yle's Somali-language news unit, uncovered the harsh abuse suffered by young people at the institutes in a report for Yle's investigative journalism unit MOT.
Hashi posed as a father looking for a place for his son in order to gain access to institutions in Somalia and Kenya.
His investigation was prompted by a conversation with his son as they were preparing to travel to Somalia for a holiday last year.
Before leaving, Hashi's son asked him if the holiday was just a ruse for him to be taken to a disciplinary institution. The young man's question did not come out of nowhere, as some of his friends and acquaintances had been lured into travelling to Somalia and also Kenya on the promise of a vacation, when in reality they were being ferried to a disciplinary camp where they would face severe punishments as well as isolation from the outside world.
Somali parents living in Finland send their children to their homelands with the intention of saving them from drugs, crime and an overly-liberal lifestyle. Some young people are sent to stay with relatives, while others end up in the disciplinary camps.
There is even a specific word for this phenomenon in the Somali language: dhaqan celis, which literally means a 'return to culture'.
On the inside
Following the conversation with his son, Hashi decided to travel to Somalia and Kenya to uncover what happens in these disciplinary camps.
As a journalist, he knew that he would never be allowed access to the institutions, so instead he posed as a father interested in finding a place for his own child at one of the camps.
The footage he secretly recorded forms the basis of MOT's documentary Loma vaihtui kahleisiin (roughly translated as 'A vacation turned into chains'), which is available to watch on Yle Areena and on Yle TV1 on Monday evening at 8pm.
The first institution Washi visited was in the Somali capital Mogadishu. The camp was surrounded by electrified barbed wire and armed guards were positioned on both sides of the entrance.
There he met the director of the institution, who explained to him what happens first when a young person arrives.
"Their heads are shaved. Shackles are put on their legs if they resist, and they are ordered to shower," the man explained.
Young people chained to beds
The disciplinary institutions market themselves to prospective clients as rehabilitation schools where young people learn good manners.
However, many parents may not be aware of how their children are treated at the camps.
Video footage obtained by Hashi at camps in both Somalia and Kenya revealed how the young people are treated, including being chained to beds.
Staff members told Hashi that the youths are beaten and punished by being given very little food.
Big business
The Somali civil war, which has been raging for about 35 years, has had a devastating effect on the country and driven millions of people to seek refuge abroad. For many Somali-background families, raising children in western countries has created challenges and cultural conflicts.
Hashi's investigation found that young people have been sent to the disciplinary institutions from all over the world. In Kenya, he met a boy who had been sent to the camp from his home in Stockholm.
The director of that institution told Hashi that they had previously housed two youths sent from Finland.
The concerns that Somali-background parents have about the influence living in a western society has on their children has proved to be a hugely profitable business for the disciplinary camps.
At one institution in Mogadishu, Hashi was told that families pay hundreds of euros per month — a massive sum of money in Somalia — to place their children there.
Finnish Foreign Ministry aware of camps
A Finnish citizen named Abdi recounted to MOT how his parents sent him to a disciplinary camp in Kenya at the age of 12. He does not appear in the documentary under his real name, as he is worried about how his parents would react.
Abdi told MOT that he spent a couple of years in the institution, suffering beatings as soon as his parents left him there.
"They used wooden sticks until they broke, or water pipes because those wouldn’t break," Abdi said, adding that the violent abuse could be triggered by any reason, with the institution's staff never explaining it.
Abdi believes his parents sent him to the institution because he had problems at school, skipped classes, and was caught stealing.
"I feel like my parents were advised from within the community that this would be a good solution," he told MOT.
Abdi eventually escaped without the help of authorities.
Although Finnish authorities have an obligation to help Finnish citizens in trouble abroad, a spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry said that information about cases such as the disciplinary camps rarely comes to light.
"We know that young people are sent there, but we receive very little direct information about these cases", Jussi Tanner, the Foreign Ministry’s head of consular services, told the programme.
A report published in 2024 (in Finnish) by the Crisis Response Association also revealed that young people were being sent to disciplinary camps from Finland. The report was funded by Finland’s Ministry of Justice.
Parents wanted to "fix" daughter
During the course of its investigation, MOT also interviewed Jasmin Osman, who was born in Denmark and raised there by a Somali father and a Ugandan mother.
When she was 19 years old, her parents suggested that she go to Uganda on holiday with her mother and stay with relatives.
However, Osman never made it to Uganda. When her flight made a stopover in Somalia, she was taken off the plane and brought to a disciplinary institution.
She was then separated from her mother and locked in a room.
The 'holiday' was a trap, planned by Osman's parents because they wanted to "fix" their daughter.
Now 28 years old and living in the United States, Osman recalled to MOT how her parents disapproved of her lifestyle at the time — as she was working in bars and partying with friends.
"They thought they could fix me. They thought I was too Western," she said.
Shackled and abused
When her mother left her at the institution, she told Osman that "you're here because you like to go to discos".
Once her mother was gone, she said, the nightmare really began.
Osman told MOT that the institution's director punished her by scalding her skin with a burning stick. She was also forced to stare directly at the sun, and she spent most of her time shackled by chains.
Once, when she was allowed to borrow a phone and call home from the institution, she managed to take a picture of her shackled feet and send it to her mother.
"It was especially humiliating when my leg and my hand were chained together so that I had to walk bent over," Osman said.
She added that the punishments were dished out for supposed indiscretions such as not getting up at 4am to pray or for arguing with staff.
Eight months in chains
According to Jasmin Osman, there were about 20 other girls in the same institution as her. The girls came from a variety of different countries, she said, including Finland.
Osman told MOT that she tried to escape every day. Her mother also tried to get her out of the camp after seeing the photo of her shackled feet.
Osman's mother did not know how badly she would be treated at the institution. Her father, however, refused to let her leave.
After being at the camp for about eight months, and spending every day in chains, she was eventually allowed by the institution's director to sleep without the shackles due to her good behaviour.
When she woke up in the morning, she made another attempt to escape.
"I climbed over the barbed wire fence and ran as far as I could," Osman recalled. Once free of the camp, she called her mother.
Culture of silence
Osman sought and received help from both the Danish and the US embassies in Kenya.
Once she made the authorities aware of what was happening at the camp, all the other girls were released and the institution's director was taken into custody.
"She never faced court for what she did," Osman noted, referring to the Norwegian-Somali woman who ran the institution.
When she returned home, her story attracted a lot of attention in Denmark and Norway. In Denmark, some right-wing politicians demanded the deportation of Somali parents who were found to have sent their children to the camps.
In Osman's view, the public discourse around the issue went off the track, as she would have preferred the focus to remain on how to support and help young people reintegrate into society after they had returned from such institutions — especially as a culture of silence shrouds the young people's experiences.
"Our whole community thinks you should be silent, don't say anything. It causes conflicts in families, with parents and siblings," she said.
"Many are clearly traumatised"
The institutions featured in the MOT documentary are promoted on social media to Somali parents as high-quality and effective boarding schools, intended to return wayward young people to a proper path.
According to the ads, students at the camps study the Qur'an and learn to improve their values and manners.
Sahfana Ali Mubarak, a special envoy at the Norwegian embassy in Kenya, told MOT that through her work she has met many young people who have ended up in these institutions.
"When I talk to them, many are clearly traumatised. You can see it in their faces and in their visible scars," she said, adding that the young people often find it very difficult to reintegrate back into their western societies as they struggle to come to terms with their experiences.
"Many parents think they are helping their child by placing them in an institution, but in reality, often the opposite happens," she said.
