By any measure, it's official child abuse
18 February, 2004
Chris Goddard and Linda Briskman
Originally appeared in Herald Sun, Melbourne.
AS we write, there are about 100 children still held in Australia's detention centres.
These children are subject to organised and ritualised abuse by the Australian Government.
We use the term "organised abuse" to mean that those children are being abused by many perpetrators who are acting together in ways that they know can be extremely harmful.
And we use the term "ritualised abuse" to mean that the children are subject to formal and repeated acts of abuse carried out under a belief system that the government uses to justify such cruelty.
Such abuse, in Australia and Nauru, is virtually without precedent in Australian history. Perhaps the closest parallel is the time when policy and law were used to remove indigenous children from their families.
The similarities are telling on many grounds.
The 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission report, Bringing Them Home, examined the effects of the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from families, and the effects of institutionalisation.
The inquiry found that many children who had been forcibly removed had been denied the experience of being raised by adults to whom they were attached and that "this is the very experience people rely on to become successful parents themselves".
A significant proportion of the stolen generations were found to have children with major behavioural problems.
High rates of violence and suicide were also found.
Mental health problems, including depression, are still evident The report also found significant levels of unresolved grief and loss, passed from one generation to another.
There are differences, of course, between what was done in the name of law and policy to indigenous children and what we are doing in the name of policy to children behind razor wire in detention centres.
Children are now spending months and years in what is, in effect, a prison.
Children, rather than being forcibly removed from their families, are compelled to watch their families divided and damaged, parental roles disintegrating.
Many have witnessed the devastating effects of depression. Some young people have themselves engaged in acts of self-harm.
Unquestionably, children in detention centres are entitled to the protection of all the international agreements that have established minimum standards of care.
Robyn Layton, QC, in her inquiry into South Australia's child protection system, supported this view.
She found that "children should only be detained as a measure of last resort and for the shortest possible time".
She also found that these children were denied the protection of the state's child welfare laws, in spite of "the serious systemic abuse of children in detention".
THE stories that came out of Bringing Them Home make heart-breaking reading: "I feel I have been totally denied a childhood"; "Our life pattern was created by the government policies and are forever with me . . . The stolen years that are worth more than any treasure are irrecoverable."
The stories from Baxter, Woomera, Port Hedland and Villawood are remarkably similar: tales of loss and grief, of scarring and trauma, of pain that will always be there.
Stories are emerging of childhoods denied, of irrecoverable innocence and joy, of pain that will pass to other generations. It is inevitable that there will again be calls for reparation and apology, rehabilitation and healing.
There is, however, a fundamental difference, one that must be giving every state and federal minister, every public servant responsible for child protection, serious pause for thought.
It took more than 100 years for an inquiry into the stolen generations.
We believe that public opinion will ensure that any inquiry into the stolen childhoods in detention centres will occur more rapidly.
We hope that it is soon enough for those complicit in this organised and ritualised abuse of these most vulnerable children to be held personally accountable.
One hundred years ago, politicians and public servants could perhaps claim that they were acting in what they thought were the best interests of the children.
Now, however, they know what they are doing. Our own history tells us they are doing a terrible wrong both to children in detention centres and to childhood in Australia and Nauru.
Associate Professor CHRIS GODDARD is head of Social Work, Monash University, and interim director of the National Research Centre into the Prevention of Child Abuse.
LINDA BRISKMAN is associate professor of Social Work, RMIT University, and author of The Black Grapevine.