DAVID ADAMS reports…
An international coalition has called for an end to the practice of holding children in immigration detention which they claim has “a devastating effect on their physical, emotional and psychological development”.
In a report released this week, the International Detention Coalition – which represents more than 250 non-government organisations and individuals in 50 countries – says tens of thousands of children are currently believed to be held in immigration detention around the world, including in Australia.
The report, Captured Childhood, was released in Geneva this week. RAHIM’S STORY
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James Thomson, policy director of Act for Peace – the international aid agency of the National Council of Churches in Australia and a founding member of the coalition, says there are 528 children in Australian detention centres, some as young as six years-of-age and without parents or carers.
“It is appalling. What’s more, we have been doing it for 20 years,” says Mr Thomson, who is a member of the coalition’s governing board.
He says the campaign to end child detention “is not about scoring political points”.
“Every Australian government since 1992 has detained children,” he says. “It is a bipartisan practice and it is institutionalised. It’s staggering to think that rather than being illegal, it is actually compulsory.
“Under Australian law, it is still mandatory to detain every man, woman and child arriving in Australia without a visa regardless of their reason for arriving. Under international law, signed by Australia, children are only meant to be detained as a last resort and for the shortest possible time.”
The report, Captured Childhood, was released by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva this week.
In compiling the report, the coalition talked to 70 children in countries in Europe as well as El Salvador, Mexico, Israel, the US, Egypt, Malaysia and Australia. The children has travelled from countries such as Afghanistan, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Ethiopia, Honduras, Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala.
The report states that children leave their homelands for a variety of reasons including because their human rights are threatened or because they are in search of a better life.
“Some children leave their homes with their families; others travel alone. Some are separated from their families along the way. Some are trafficked for sexual or other forms of exploitation.”
The report says the detention of children is a “denial of their fundamental right to liberty”. While it says some are held in purpose-built facilities, which may offer better amenity that what they experienced on their homeland or on their journey, others are “incarcerated in squalor, placing them at risk of illness and disease”.
“Some are kept in jail cells or in circumstances that are hurriedly constructed and makeshift,” it says. “Some are kept in circumstances that seem designed to isolate and humiliate them.”
Regardless of the circumstances in which children are held, the report says detention has a “profound and negative impact” on them, undermining their psychological and physical health and compromising their development.
“Children are at risk of suffering depression and anxiety, as well as from symptoms such as insomnia, nightmares and bed-wetting,” it says. It found detention can led to feelings of hopelessness which can come out in acts of violence and that it erodes the functioning of families with some children losing the support and protection of their parents or taking on roles beyond their level of maturity.
The report has called for governments to develop legislation, policies and practices which would allow children who are refugees, asylum seekers or irregular migrants to be free to reside in the community which their immigration status is resolved. It says justifications behind the detention of children – including those relating to health and security screening, for identity checks or for convenience – as being “unacceptable”.
The report advocates the adoption of a ‘child sensitive’ community assessment and placement model.
~ http://idcoalition.org/children/