The inhuman culture of despair among children in our detention centres

• Isolation - cutting the child off from normal social experience, preventing the experience of interpersonal skills and disallowing spontaneous fun and enjoyment.
• Corruption – teaching the child socially deviant patterns of behaviour. The Woomera detention centre, we found out, was a breeding ground for those types of behaviour. As well as children with families, the unaccompanied minors from Afghanistan were particularly susceptible to emotional abuse. With no family support they easily lapsed into a despondent state. Qadir, a 16-year-old, with such a traumatised past, was detained in a psychiatric hospital in Adelaide when the state public advocate intervened to prevent him being returned to Woomera.

I met with the Immigration Detention Advisory Group on May 17, 2002 to discuss these matters for improvement of facilities for the new Baxter detention centre and I mentioned the pervasion of a culture of despair across all detention centres. Three days later I wrote to Ray Funnell, chair of the Immigration Detention Advisory Group, and said:

I believe the overriding concern is still the processing of applicants’ claims in a reasonable time. In conjunction with this is the need for applicants not to be held in limbo without communication on the progress of their cases; the need for independent legal representation; and the need to provide a category of visa, such as a humanitarian visa, that allows the asylum seeker into the community pending the outcome of their cases if not resolved within a specified time period, say three months. The special visa would also take into account those people who wish to return to their country of origin or go to a third country but cannot because of political or other reasons.

If the processing aspects can be addressed then I believe we can offer valuable services in education, counselling and other activities, especially if we allow ready access of concerned people from outside organisations such as STTARS. If we are just improving the environment for asylum seekers in Baxter then I think we will ultimately face the same problems as we have had up to now.

Ray Funnell replied on June 4, 2002:

Thank you for your letter of 20 May 2002 and for the information and the impressions passed on to the IDAG during our recent meeting in Adelaide. I hope you and the other people with whom we met that day are aware of the importance that we as a group place on such meetings.

We continue to work at improving the lot of those being held in detention and we remain hopeful and, we trust, realistically hopeful of being able to bring about some changes in policy that will result in a much better system of processing asylum seekers.

After nearly two years in Baxter nothing has changed for the better. The culture of despair remains. And the condition of the children has grown steadily worse. Many reports from psychiatrists, other health and social workers, and from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission support this. According to a social welfare worker at Baxter, Michael, who showed so much potential when I first met him in the November compound of Woomera, had joined his father and mother in various dysfunctional and self-harming behaviours. “They are like caged animals, with the father going crazy and the mother going under. They are so far gone as a family,” she said.

Can anything be salvaged from the wreckage of families like Michael’s? The Howard government refuses to intervene to save children’s lives. I spoke to Neil Andrew, Federal Member for Wakefield and Speaker of the House of Representatives on January 30, 2004 and he told me that the “government was stuck between a rock and a hard place. We’re damned if we do and we’re damned if we don’t.” At least he conceded that families were suffering in detention.

The symptoms of the failure of the detention system are obvious by now. I know from my experiences at Woomera that if we are going to have a system of mandatory detention, three months is the limit. Otherwise we will irreparably damage children’s lives. Mandatory detention as a system doesn’t work unless we are interested in making people suffer and behave abnormally. To justify using it as a method of prevention of mass boat people coming to Australia sets us up as torturers.

The new morality under Prime Minister John Howard can accommodate this, as seen with the Tampa and Siev X affairs, the Pacific Solution and the recent war in Iraq. After espousing the evils of Saddam Hussein’s regime and Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and if hypocrisy is a virtue under the new morality, then the Australian government has nothing to fear. But what of the Australian people? We are also responsible for the people in detention. Where are we heading if we engage in this kind of human rights abuse? Would we be so complacent if our own children were in detention?

Concerned groups of people in Adelaide are now mounting a rescue operation, at least to have the remaining families come out into community detention and given a chance for the healing process to work as well as regain some semblance of normal living.