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"Cruel" treatment of children in Australian detention camps

Wish we weren't here: Children’s postcards from Christmas Island
Drawings by children in detention on Christmas Island

It is to Australia's unending shame that it has children of families - and in many instances unaccompanied minors - seeking asylum in Australia, behind bars in so-called detention centres.   It is cruel in the extreme and the consequences for these children utterly devastating.

"In a statement tendered to the Australian Human Rights Commission inquiry into children in immigration detention, the now 17 year-old HSC student at Holroyd High said his memories continue to haunt him.

''If you're in Afghanistan [and] the Taliban want to kill, they just shoot at you and you will die easily. But in Australia, they will kill you slowly with your mind.''

****

"The inquiry, headed by AHRC president Gillian Triggs, is investigating the impact of detention on children, some of whom are as young as six weeks old. There are 929 children in detention in Australia and a further 177 in Nauru.

The inquiry heard of harsh conditions at Christmas Island, which delegates inspected last month.

Ms Triggs said she saw children who were ''manifestly ill'' and not receiving adequate medical care. At Villawood, she observed an ''environment of constant surveillance, supervision and harassment''.

Paediatrician Karen Zwi was also left troubled by what she saw on Christmas Island, including children with infected sores who were crying out in pain caused by tooth decay. Babies are unable to crawl because the ground is so rough and the only playground is unusable during the day due to the extreme heat.

New mothers are forced to queue up for strictly rationed nappies, baby wipes and powdered milk, with staff telling them constantly they will never be resettled in Australia.

''People describe this as cruel, torture. Those are the words they use,'' Professor Zwi said.

Family and child psychiatrist Sarah Mares shared pictures drawn by children in detention, one of which showed a jailed figure with no mouth or hands but tears running down its cheeks.

Representatives from the Department of Immigration told the inquiry that children did have access to adequate medical care and support for mental health problems."

And also go here for the ABC's radio program The World Today:

"Lexi, I understand that a former child detainee also gave evidence to the enquiry. What did she have to say?

LEXI METHERELL: Yes, well Rim Jezan arrived in Australia as a 12-year-old. She fled persecution with her family from Iran. She is a member of a religious minority there.

She spent three years and two months in detention in Sydney's Villawood detention centre, but is now in her 20s and an immigration lawyer herself. She gave some insights into what it was like to be a child in detention and one thing that has stuck in her memory is the practice, one which is still continuing of roll calls in the middle of the night that would involve guards opening the door of their room at night with a torch to check that they were still there.

And the other memory that she recalled of, recalled is being taken out of the detention centre to school and being picked up each day by security guards.

RIM JEZAN: We felt that we were different in some way, but didn't know how and why and it was, it was just towards the end when we starting telling kids and children at school when they kept questioning it, why do you get picked up by different persons every day, why this, why that, so we had to come up with different story.

It was my brother and I were like, we can't tell them because they might look at us differently.

TANYA NOLAN: And that's Rim Jezan who was held at the Villawood detention centre for more than three years."


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