THELOCAL.CH: child abuse – Locked up for being different: The scandal of Switzerland's 'undesirables'.
A pregnant teenage runaway, a former foster care child, an adolescent boy raped by priests: for decades, these were the kinds of people Switzerland locked up as "undesirables"… Free labour – The centres were also used as a source of unpaid labour. Daniel Cevey, 76, told AFP he spent his childhood in foster care, and was later placed in administrative detention. He never found out why. He was forced to do farm work like picking potatoes. "We were never paid," he said. "All those years, we went to the fields instead of going to school." Many of those detained were sucked into the system at a young age. Ursula Biondi had a rough childhood with a violent father, she told AFP. Then, aged just 15, she was repeatedly raped by the father of the family where she worked as a nanny. When she was 17, she fell in love and the couple ran away to Italy. But after she became pregnant, she was forced back to Switzerland and in 1966 was detained for a year at a women's prison in the central town of Hindelbank.