RIGHTS-AUSTRALIA: Children Take Brunt of Immigration Detention Policy

By Neena Bhandari Reprint | | Print |

Neena Bhandari

SYDNEY, Jul 25 2005 (IPS) - Forcibly removed from classes, 12-year-old Ian Hwang and his six-year-old Australian-born sister, Janie are now back at school from the Villawood immigration detention centre where they were taken four months ago because their mother had overstayed her visa.

This South Korean family’s saga is one among many that has brought to light the failures, errors and inadequacies of the Australian Immigration Department and its policy of mandatory detention.

Ironically, for a nation of migrants, Australia has one of the most stringent policies against illegal immigration in the world. Refugees or asylum-seekers without inadequate documentation are put into mandatory detention under the Migration Act, 1958.

Since July 1999, at least 10,000 people, including 3,899 children, have been through the immigration detention centres. There are 43 infants and children still in various immigration detention centres across the country in Villawood (New South Wales), Port Augusta and Baxter (South Australia), Maribyrnong (Victoria) and Christmas Island.

While Ian and Janie have been given bridging visas, their mother has been put under ”community detention”. Children like them often suffer emotional and psychological trauma and stress suffered in detention with life-long impacts on them and their families.

As the South Korean family’s lawyer Michaela Byers said Ian had witnessed three attempted suicides in detention and was ”traumatised by the horrors”. Some children need intensive treatment, psychological support and remedial education to lead a normal life.

Young Shayan suffered nightmares and would wake up crying at night. He repeatedly drew pictures of fences with himself and his family confined inside them. Though his family was recognised as refugees and released three years ago, at the age of seven, he was diagnosed with acute and chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The Australian Medical Association has warned that children in detention were especially vulnerable to mental illness and should be released as these young detainees were being subjected to what is in effect child abuse.

Banging her head against the wall, 16-year-old Valentia Gythalovesa wants to get out from the Villawood detention centre. She had lived in Australia for nine years and was studying in class 11, when immigration officials came to her family home a few months ago and took away her parents and younger brother because her mother had overstayed her visa.

Brought up in a prison environment, these children are frightened and suffer separation anxiety. As Alanna Sherry, coordinator for the humanitarian non-political action group Chilout (Children Out of Detention) says, ”Young people quickly begin to exhibit the same depression symptoms as adults”.

An 11-year-old was acting the man and trying to cut his wrists, imitating the distressed adults around him while some children were on anti-depressants and others have been on hunger strikes.

In 2003, the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMIA) informed parliament that five children had sewn their lips together, three had slashed their arms, two had swallowed shampoo. One child tried suicide by hanging and 13 had threatened to hurt themselves.

Amnesty International’s report, ‘Australia: The impact of indefinite detention – the case to change Australia’s mandatory detention regime’, includes examples of trauma experienced by detained children, including teargas and late night spot checks by guards, and witnessing their parents being abused.

The report described how they lived in cramped conditions among people who were suffering depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. There was no consistent full-time education system, no play and leisure areas, and limited contact with the outside world.

Michael Andrew Tran was born in detention to Vietnamese asylum- seeker parents and so was 11-month-old Tina, whose parents came to Australia in 1996 seeking asylum from China and were put in detention along with her three-year-old brother in August 2003.

Most of these children’s photographs appear in security mug shots with a barcode and for many the picture on the fluorescent yellow ID cards is their very first photograph. Growing up behind a razor-wire fence, one mother described the burden of disgrace these children felt.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) has stated that refugees who are most at risk of sexual violence are children in detention, particularly girls and unaccompanied minors.

Earlier this week, yet another immigration scandal, involving allegations that a woman was sexually abused while her young daughter watched, was made public.

An Iranian refugee was placed at the Curtin Detention Centre compound in Western Australia, where she was the only woman among 50 men. There were allegations later that a man had tried to rape her while her nine- year-old daughter looked on.

Mandatory detention for unlawful non-citizens was introduced in Australia in 1992 and while many countries detain illegal immigrants, Australia is probably the only country where detention is mandatory for adults and children during case process.

In the absence of any maximum statutory time limit for detention, the number of years in detention may vary, depending on each case and may continue indefinitely.

Factors contributing to extended detention periods for children include difficulty in establishing identity, litigation and obtaining travel documentation. Australia’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission reports that average period for a child in immigration detention is one year, eight months and 11 days.

After Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs) were introduced in 1999, family reunion was no longer possible and wives and children, wanting to join husbands and fathers in Australia, became easy prey to people smugglers.

This led to a steady rise in the proportion of children on asylum seeker boats, reaching 40 percent in 2001, when 146 children died in the infamous SIEV X Indonesian refugee boat tragedy.

For 13 years since this brutal policy of mandatory detention was introduced, human and refugee rights activists have been campaigning to get Australia to honour its many international legal obligations.

Australia is a signatory to the United Nations 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol relating to the Status of Refugees. It has also ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Australia’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commissioner, Sev Ozdowski has said, ”We must all bear the responsibility for ensuring that all those genuinely in need of international protection receive it. They should not be demonised or punished by being locked up indefinitely behind barbed wire, but should be saluted for their courage and their will.”

Refugee activists are urging the government to abandon community detention and replace it with whole-of-family bridging visas, with study, work and health-care rights.