Nauru files show how secrecy hides abuse
How many reports into the mistreatment of children does the country need to have before it finally learns something?
On Wednesday, the Guardian published 2,000 leaked incident reports from Australia’s off-shore detention camp for asylum-seekers on Nauru. More than 51 per cent of these incidents involve children, despite children constituting only 18 per cent of those in detention for the period covered by reports. Incidents range from self-harm to sexual abuse to physical assaults to cruelty. How many times in Australia will we report on the abuse and mistreatment of children in institutional care before we finally learn from our mistakes?
The treatment meted out to the stolen generations led to Bringing Them Home report in 1997. Aboriginal deaths in custody led to a royal commission between 1987 and 1991. Forced adoption led to a Senate report, Commonwealth Contribution to Former Forced Adoption Policies and Practices in 2012. The royal commission into institutional responses to sexual abuse, established in 2013, has produced three reports to date. Still under way, the commission had documented the horrific sexual abuse of thousands of children in state or state-sponsored care. Various state governments have held inquiries and investigations into child protection, children in out-of-home care and disability services to uncover abuse, neglect and system failures. And now, the government of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, sparked by harrowing footage from the Don Dale youth detention centre, is establishing a royal commission into the Northern Territory juvenile justice system.
All these reports. All these damaged children. All on Australia’s watch. All on its consciences. Each report is in a different context. All teach us similar lessons. Abuse and mistreatment occur when absolute power is wielded over vulnerable people. Abuse is most easily undertaken when the victims have been dehumanised, especially on the basis of their race, disability, gender or economic class. Abuse flourishes systematically when information doesn’t flow transparently. Without oversight, monitoring and independent reporting, or where there are ineffective or no whistleblower protections, there is little chance for mistreatment to come to light. When vulnerable young people have limited access to family or other advocates, or when the media has poor or no access to institutional care or information about it, abuse can continue for years unchecked. Publicly, in many of these circumstances, politicians and other authorities continue to assert that everything is just fine. Like the politicians who told us nothing was amiss at the Don Dale juvenile detention centre. Goings-on there apparently didn’t even pique their interest .
Australia’s track record looking after children in institutional or state care is poor, and the failures continue to the present day. Knowing all this, even before the Guardian’s revelations, how can Australians look at the situation of asylum seeker and refugee children detained by the Australian government on Nauru and assume everything is just fine? If governments can’t assure the safety and well-being of young Australian citizens detained in the Northern Territory, how can the nation be trusted with the lives of refugee and asylum-seeker children being detained offshore?
In fact there is ample evidence that the children on Nauru are anything but “just fine”. The Guardian’s release of the incident reports on Wednesday confirms the Human Rights Commission’s 2014 report ‘The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention’. It found that of 1,129 asylum-seeker children detained by the Australian government, there have been: 233 assaults, 33 reported sexual assaults, 128 incidences of self-harm, 34 per cent who require psychiatric support. Children on Nauru are at risk to all the circumstances that previous reports tell us foster a culture of abuse: They are vulnerable — some are even alone without family — and trapped in indefinite detention.
They are dehumanised, serving no other function except as a human-warning system to other would-be asylum-seekers. They are isolated and hidden from our view, with no independent oversight and no ability for advocates to speak on their behalf. Australia could actually show it has learned something from all these previous inquiries and reports, and take action now.
For example, Australia must demand the government appoint a children’s commissioner for Nauru who can independently monitor and report on the well-being of children on the island. It must insist that the government make reporting of abuse in off-shore detention mandatory. It must advocate the government overturn the laws silencing health-care professionals and others from speaking out about children on Nauru. Those things aren’t enough, but each would be a good start. The best outcome, of course, would be to remove children from Nauru. Is there a politician left in Canberra with the decency and heart to stand up and for these forgotten, abused, victimised children?
I’ve argued previously that Australia will have a royal commission one day into offshore detention. It may not be for a decade or more, I said, and our children and grandchildren will wonder how we all let it happen. Are more than 1,000 reports of cruelty and abuse of children enough to make Australia act now? Or will the country just wait a decade to confront the inevitability of shameful findings of another royal commission into historical patterns of institutional abuse of children?
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Kristina Keneally is a former premier of New South Wales. She is the host of To the Point on Sky News and the director of Gender Inclusion at the Macquarie Graduate School of Management.
