When we do nothing about child abuse
By LUCY CLARK, Daily Telegraph, 8th February 2002.
CAN YOU imagine a six-year-old girl, asks LUCY CLARK incarcerated and separated from her parents, weeping alone at night with no-one to comfort her, no-one to stroke her little hand? Can you imagine a 2� year-old boy screaming hysterically in his father's arms while a guard drags the father by the hair and pushes him over, the father lacerating his arms trying to protect his son in the fall?
A guard trying to put leg-cuffs on the same baby? The father and baby placed in a solitary confinement cell for 13 days, let out twice a day to go to the toilet, the baby running around the cell crying and begging to be let out, pissing on a bundle of clothes in the corner because he can't, of course, regulate his bladder, while the father tries to calm him with stories? For 13 days?
Can you imagine a young mother, handcuffed and roughly escorted with her two small children to a cell, not let out to go to the bathroom � at all � for two days, so she uses a plastic supermarket bag as a toilet?
No imagination required, because these are not imaginary tales. This, and worse, is happening to children in immigration detention centres in this country.
If you're becoming weary of the complicated debate about asylum seekers, then forget the debate for a moment. Oft-repeated rhetoric from both sides has a habit of skimming over the personal details, and these stories about children could not weary anyone.
Like the two year-old in Port Hedland detention centre last week who watched his pregnant mother collapse. Wearing the heavy winter clothes she arrived in (and not supplied with any clothes more suitable to Western Australia's searing summer heat), the woman collapsed after being on a hunger strike in order to get medical attention for her boy. He has a hole in the heart and a bad speech impediment.
Or the 20-month-old girl in South Australia's Woomera detention centre who has spent more than half her life in detention. She has no memory of ever seeing a blade of grass, and when walking around the dusty, razor-wired perimeter of the centre with her mother, she sees a weed growing on the outside. She tries to reach through the fence to touch it, but can't. The mother reaches through the fence and pulls out the weed and hands it to the girl, who is mesmerised and enthralled by it.
Or the 15-year-old orphaned girl sent by her grandparents with her 11-year-old brother with people smugglers to Australia. Every morning for six months she dresses in her good clothes and sits on a chair in the compound, waiting to be called for a second interview with the Immigration Department. When a visiting female lawyer with a daughter the same age reaches out to her, the girl melts into her, sobbing: "No-one has touched me in six months."
A 15 year-old boy who had been hiding in Afghanistan � curled in a cave the size of a fireplace, brought food by his family every two days � is unaccompanied in Woomera. After two years in detention, he desperately wants to return to his "life" in Afghanistan because he would rather "spend two days with my family and then be killed" than stay in sunny Australia.
Another unaccompanied minor who fled Afghanistan for his life has been in detention for two years. Now 18, he sobs like a baby and is being treated for depression. He is perplexed and insulted that John Howard wants to pay him to return to the place where his life is in danger.
Two adolescent girls who arrived in the country happy and healthy lose control of their bladder and their bowels, and daily suffer the humiliation of incontinence. There is no medical reason for their problem.
These are some of the first-hand accounts collected by children's rights advocate Trish Highfield, and Jacquie Everitt, co-ordinator of the Detained Children's Project at the Jesuit Refugee Service.
There are countless other stories of children with no bladder control, formerly energetic children who are now so depressed they cannot eat; some are mute. Most small children have night terrors and many cling to their mothers all day. Some have been in detention for up to four years, and others are young enough to have no other experience of life.
Great chunks of their lives are going missing, and as each bleak hour passes, their spirits are shrinking.
Yesterday, the media reported that a 12 year-old girl in detention says that her only future is to commit suicide. Twelve.
This is Government-sponsored child abuse, and if something is not done soon, John Howard, Phillip Ruddock, and all of us who do nothing � all of us � will have blood on our hands.
Children's blood.