The cruelty and indignity of mandatory detention

When Professor Louise Newman took the unprecedented step of speaking out plainly on Lateline last week about the impending mental health crisis in Immigration detention centres, the reaction was zero.

As the antipathy towards asylum seekers grows, carefully nurtured through successive elections by our politicians, Australia is reaching a position which allows any cruelty and indignity to be visited upon asylum seekers and their children.

In this way the Minister, the Immigration department (DIAC) and the three human monitoring bodies with oversight of detention allowed over two hundred children locked up in detention to be denied access to school for six months. The Minister is the legal guardian of 150 of these children, with responsibility for their care and welfare as well as their imprisonment.

“Identification and Support of People in Detention who are Survivors of Torture and Trauma” is the department’s policy document dealing with mental health issues. It states that detention for people who have been tortured must be “only as a last resort”. In detail it describes the “many pathways” by which people are to be referred to specialist services.

For a person to be defined as having been tortured, the policy document takes an “inclusive” approach stating that “torture incorporates any act by which severe pain or suffering , whether mental or physical, is intentionally inflicted on a person”. This definition has no relation to the granting of a visa and is purely for care purposes only. To successfully claim refugee status, it is not enough to be tortured – you must be tortured for the right reason that is on one or more of the Refugee Convention grounds. Tortured people can be refused refugee recognition and sent back like any other.

Last week a man in detention showed me his negative decision from DIAC which stated: “I accept that you have been tortured by the Taliban but you as an ordinary man (i.e. not high political profile) can return to Kabul”. I looked at this man’s face with his scrunched up eye, knife scar across the cheek and his neck with deeply embedded folds of skin into yet another scar. I listened as he explained that first his father had died then his brother had been killed and then he received the threat that he was next. He fears return.

Another man told me of his brother. This brother was hung upside down and beaten for days. I could see that he is deeply troubled and struggling to hang on to reality. He is barely surviving in detention. His fear of being returned is palpable. Somehow his history of torture did not enable him to gain entry through the “many pathways” into specialist care. Certainly his background of torture will not admit him into the policy of “detention as a last resort” because the fact is that this policy, like so many detention policies, exists in name only.

Torture is something people do not readily discuss. As many of us are loath to talk about the worst things that have ever happened to us, so it is with people who have been tortured. To recall the moment, to talk about it, is often to take the person back to the worst time of their life. I remember a man whom I thought that I knew very well. He and his wife had shared their refugee journey with me in great detail. Yet one day by accident I accompanied him to what we thought was an immigration interview but which turned out to be an ASIO interview. I stayed at his request which was how I found out that he had been serially tortured in Iraq. What was so shocking for me was to see that he had already given this information. It was carefully printed on pages in front of us. They made him go over it all again as they ran a pencil along the lines checking each detail.

At the end of four hours we were both shaking. That man was detained on Nauru for four years even though both immigration and ASIO knew that he had been brutally tortured for political reasons. They had medical evidence of his misshapen shoulders and crooked feet and knees to back up the details they had meticulously recorded twice over.

We know that people who have been tortured and suffered extreme trauma, such as watching family members killed or mothers and sisters raped, suffer most of all in detention. The enforced idleness leaves them with too much time to fight back memories and fend off those thoughts too terrible to deal with. The inability to sleep for days and weeks drives them crazy with weariness and confusion.

Right now our detention centres are filled with people who have experienced or witnessed torture and trauma. Teenagers without parents who have nothing to do all day but worry about their widowed mothers and vulnerable brothers and sisters in camps. One 16-year-old who slashed himself told me, “I had to cut myself because of the pain in my head – it was exploding”. He is still in detention waiting with nothing to do all day, locked in the same place for six months.

There are people with bodies full of shrapnel. Shrapnel moves inside the body, rubbing and slicing muscles and nerves, destroying tissue. The contracted medical services have decided not to remove shrapnel because “many people in detention centres have shrapnel wounds – these injuries which are not life threatening, occurred before they came into the centres”.

Last time it took the discovery of a blond, blue-eyed Australian resident to ring the alarm bells on Australia’s mandatory indefinite detention policy. Change was enacted to relieve pressure on an embarrassed government but legislation did not make this change lasting and so here we are five years later back in the brutal dark ages where human rights abuses can be enacted on asylum seekers in detention.

Is there a chance that with a minority government that Australia could rewrite this script and make a new beginning?

The first step would be to dismantle mandatory detention. We could return to a gentler kinder time. When the Vietnamese boatpeople arrived, they did not have passports and visas in hand. They stepped off their boats into Migrant Hostels where they learnt English, got jobs, moved out, bought homes, had children who today are across every strata of Australian life. Today these Vietnamese Australians are part of the fabric of our rich culture.

Why don’t we treat these new arrivals in the same way? In a generation our children will ask why we did what we are doing. And what will we say?