Holding children indefinitely in offshore detention is Australia’s shame — and the world knows

IF YOU knew of the abuse children were suffering in detention on Nauru, you probably wouldn’t support the stop-the-boats policy.

OPINION

THEY are the unwilling trophies of a steely enforcement of the government’s stop-the-boats policy — a role no child deserves.

The 102 minors held on Nauru now have another function, as global emblems of Australia’s capacity for brutality and unfairness.

The tolerance of Australians for the abuses of youngsters in the name of border protection will increasingly be tested as more details of their plights emerge.

We will be confronted by terms such as “resignation syndrome”, a psychiatric disorder that drives a child to abandon all hopes of a better life.

It is a disorder the Coalition Government and the Labor Opposition will hear more of as medical experts, including the government’s own, list in public the illnesses developing in the wretched conditions on Nauru.

Underlining the tragedy are reports youngsters have contemplated or attempted suicide as the only means to escape from a detention that in some cases they have endured for half or even all of their lives.

The abuse of youngsters is tolerated by Australians in the name of border protection.

The stark and disturbing material will highlight the fact that both sides of parliament have reached a policy cul-de-sac.

The only way out would be to go into reverse, and they won’t do that.

Neither Labor nor the Liberals want to be seen as “soft” on asylum seekers. Stop-the-boats, started under Kevin Rudd and refined by Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, has electoral support.

But only if the specific consequences of the policy are ignored or hidden.

An Iranian refugee with her daughter on a beach on Nauru. They have been detained for five years. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Attempts to push the tattered policy behind a border protection curtain might be exposed in December when Labor holds its deferred national conference where immigration will be debated.

Hiding those confronting consequences — and maintaining public tolerance of them — will not continue forever, as the world is let in on our ugly secret.

“These children and their families have now been detained for over five years — imprisoned for fleeing the same atrocities our government comes here and condemns.,” Daniel Webb, director of legal advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre, said at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland.

“And after five years of detention, these children have now lost hope. Some have stopped speaking. Some have stopped eating. A 10-year-old boy recently tried to kill himself.”

A child plays with a doll in Nauru’s detention centre.

Any amount of time in detention is damaging, but five years is an enormous stretch in the life of a young child, Mr Webb told the Council.

The dead-end of offshore detention was raised by the new High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet who called the system “an affront to the protection of human rights”.

And this week Mr Webb told the council: “These kids should be free and full of curiosity and hope. Instead, they are growing up surrounded by suffering and despair. The situation is absolutely untenable.”

“After five long years, these children and their families deserve a future. And the Australian Government deserves to be held accountable by this council for its cruelty.”