THE DETENTION OF CHILDREN IN AUSTRALIA

In 2022, Australia’s child detention policies made international headlines when newly-elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that two Australian-born children – Kopika and Tharnicaa Nadesalingam – would be permitted to return to the small Queensland town of Biloela they called home. The girls had spent the preceding four-and-a-half years in immigration detention, first in a detention facility on the outskirts of Melbourne, then in a remote centre on Christmas Island, and finally in community detention in Perth.

Cases like this are just the tip of the iceberg of Australia’s (historical and present-day) child detention policies. In the three decades of the policy’s operation, Australia has detained tens of thousands of minors across a range of institutional and non-institutional settings. Children have been held in offshore processing facilities, most notably on the small island country on Nauru; in onshore detention facilities, including Immigration Detention Centres, Immigration Transit Accommodation, and Alternative Places of Detention on the Australian mainland and the Australian territory of Christmas Island; and in community detention under residence determinations, usually in designated houses or apartments within the community. While the number of children in detention has fallen over the last decade, children continue to be subject to this policy – thus far, without critical analysis of the life course effects.

Australia’s immigration detention policy is one of the strictest in the world. It requires the mandatory detention of all non-citizens who are in the country without authorisation. Australia detains a range of non-citizens under this policy. Some detainees are refugees or people seeking asylum who came to Australia by boat from countries such as Iran, Sudan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Vietnam or Afghanistan. Others do not come from refugee backgrounds but have been incarcerated, pending deportation, for violating the conditions of their visas. All immigration detainees are held indefinitely on an ‘administrative’ basis – that is, without charge or trial – and have no guarantee of release. This policy has been in place since 1994 and makes no exception for minors.

THE FORGOTTEN CHILDREN REPORT

The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) – our partner in this project – is Australia’s national human rights institution. The Commission promotes and protects the human rights of all people in Australia, including children and people seeking asylum. It advises all arms of government on law, policy and practice; monitors and reports on Australia’s performance in meeting its international human rights commitments; and raises community awareness of human rights through educational, training and media outreach activities. The AHRC has long been, and continues to be, a key advocate for the rights of children in immigration detention. The AHRC first brought the issue of child detention to the national agenda twenty years ago, with the release of their 2004 report A Last Resort? Ten years later, in 2014, public concern for the welfare of child detainees peaked when the AHRC gave voice to the 1,068 children who were detained by Australia at that time through their high-profile report The Forgotten Children.

The Forgotten Children report documented an alarmingly high prevalence of mental illness among these children and found that child detainees’ emotional and mental wellbeing had been severely impacted by their detention. The report noted that many detention facilities were unsuitable environments for minors, and that access to recreation, toys and books, excursions and (pre-school or school level) education was limited. The report was particularly damning about the impacts of detention on parent-child relationships, noting that institutional structures and routines in detention distorted familial relationships, making it difficult for parents – who were themselves stripped of agency – to care for their children. Children were regularly exposure to distressed, sick, psychotic or suicidal adults, which compromised their wellbeing and sense of safety.

Concerningly, the report also documented physical and sexual violence within some facilities, including multiple assaults involving children. During the report period (January 2013 to March 2014), 233 assaults involving children were documented, as were 128 incidents of self-harm by children and 171 incidents of threatened self-harm by children. A further 33 incidents of sexual assault were reported, most involving minors.

In the years since the report was released, evidence of trauma and abuse in Australian immigration detention facilities has only mounted. It is now widely recognised that immigration detention has a profound negative impact on children’s health and development, and that the risks children encounter in detention are unacceptably high. While outcomes are particularly bleak where institutional detention in concerned, wellbeing outcomes are also poor in community detention. Despite popular and political representations of community detention as an innocuous alternative to institutional detention, research attests that ‘softer’ forms of detention also impose harm, with rates of self-harm in community detention, for example, exceeding those for permanent residents with similar histories of pre-migration trauma. Factors such as restrictive conditions, extended uncertainty, family separation, and limited access to legal, health and social support all contribute to reduced wellbeing.

THE NEED FOR THIS RESEARCH

While the immediate effects of immigration detention on children are known to be severe, children’s experiences and outcomes after detention have received negligible attention. The few studies that have been conducted internationally about the long-term impacts of immigration detention indicate that – while mental health and wellbeing typically improve upon release from detention – past detainees often experience “an ongoing sense of insecurity and injustice, difficulties with relationships, profound changes to view of self and poor mental health” (Coffey 2010) in the years after their release. Much of this work, however, focuses on adults’ experiences or is psychological or psychiatric in orientation. This leaves many questions unanswered concerning both the full and lasting consequences of child detention, and how outcomes are shaped by other social policies and practices, including access to state services and supports after release.

A key aim of this project is therefore to develop a holistic picture of children’s post-detention trajectories and the factors that shape them. Using visual methods that have been specifically developed for research with minors, as well as in-depth interviews that locate long-term outcomes and trajectories within adult participants’ broader life worlds and socio-political contexts, the project will deliver a detailed evidence-base to enable renewed advocacy for urgently-needed policy and legislative reform.