Silent Lips
By Heather Tyler
Unedited version of article published in part by the Daily Telegraph (22 Jan 2002) and by the Middle East Times.
HUMAN rights activists and psychiatrists have today condemned any move by the Department of Immigration to remove children from detention centres without their parents.
Chairman of Suicide prevention Australia Dr Michael Dudley said children should not be released into the community without at least one parent.
"The idea of fostering is not good enough. The separation of parents from children goes against the family values the current Government tries to promote.
"Children should not be separated from their parents. The whole situation presents an untenable moral dilemma."
Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock's comments follows a protest at Woomera where up to 70 Afghan detainees, including children, reportedly sewed their lips together and over 140 more staged a hunger strike over conditions in detention and the delays in visa hearings.
Dr Dudley, who has just returned from a visit to the embattled detention centre in South Australia, said this was an unjust, unworkable policy and children should be released forthwith.
"These people are depressed and traumatised. The act of sewing their lips together is a symbolic way to get the message out that they are being silenced," he said.
"Children in detention are not in a safe place. If children in the community were exposed to the violence they witness, and conditions inside Woomera, they would be removed from that environment. Why should this be any different?"
Dr Dudley described some of the conditions inside Woomera as "filthy and bloodstained".
"The toilet block has bloodstains on the floor from detainees mutilating themselves in sheer desperation."
Dr Dudley said there was no grass, just barren sandy earth, no shade from the sun where temperatures reached 40 degrees Centigrade, and the children had nowhere suitable to play.
Parents and children had problems created by their institutionalisation, compounded by the fact they came from experiences of persecution in their homeland.
"Government detention policies make adequate parenting impossible," Dr Dudley said. "Parents are themselves under great stress."
When he and two other psychiatrists visited the centre, the detainees were introduced to them by their detainee numbers, and not their names.
Prominent human rights lawyer Jacqui Everitt also condemns the policy of separation, having viewed it first hand at the Sydney detention centre of Villawood.
She visited Woomera in November and said she had never seen such desolation, even though she had visited detention camps in South Korea and West Timor.
"The children in Woomera looked anorexic. They were all bed wettiing and their parents could not look after them properly because they too were suffering from the effects of incarceration. Children should be released from detention with parents. Children need their parents who will be able to function as better parents outside the stress of detention," Ms Everitt said.
Junie Ong, spokeswoman for ChilOut, an organisation campaigning for the release of all children in detention, said Australia could "never again look the international community in the eye and espouse our support of human rights when we reportedly have children with their lips sewn together, in our backyard.
"We are marching to moral oblivion with blinkers on for as long as we allow this obscenity to continue."
Ms Everitt said an 18-month-old Iranian girl released from Villawood detention center last week had "flowered" since her release, rejoicing in her discovery of a normal life for the first time.
"For the first time she was laughing, real belly laughs of joy," Ms Everitt said.
Shubnam Badrie and her mother Zahraa were released on temporary visas after Shubnam's older brother Shayan, then aged 6, was fostered into the community after long-term detention in Woomera and then Villawood.
Shayan was released after stark pictures of his emaciated state were published across the country. While in Villawood he refused to eat or drink and he was hospitalised on several occasions.
His father Mohammed Saeed remains in Villawood while the family battles a deportation order in the Federal Court. Shayan longs to be reunited with his father but is too frightened to return to Villawood, even for a visit.
Ms Everitt described the reunion between Shayan and Shubnam as "ecstatic".
"They laughed and played and giggled together, something I had never seen them do while they were in detention."
The blonde-haired toddler went on a picnic to Vaucluse House where she saw long grass for the first time in her life, and then was taken to the beach where she discovered seawater and sand.
"She picked up the sand by a handful, in wonder, just like a baby," Ms Everitt said.