Mental Health of Children in Australian Detention Center Reaches ‘Crisis Point’

Source: Ny Times, 05/07/2018

The decision came just before a federal court hearing on Wednesday at
which lawyers for the girl’s family planned to argue that she be
brought to Australia immediately. She has serious mental health issues
and is likely to leave for Australia on Friday, according to The
Guardian Australia.
The girl, whose name and age have not been disclosed, is at least the
seventh seriously ill child to be brought to Australia under legal
pressure since the Nauru center reopened in 2012, according to the
National Justice Project, a nonprofit legal service that has
represented most of them, including the girl on Wednesday.
The seven children include one girl in February and a 10-year-old boy
in March who were considered to be at risk of killing themselves.
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Under current Australian immigration policy, asylum-seekers and
refugees who reach Australia by boat are forbidden to enter, in a bid
by the government to discourage dangerous ocean crossings and human
trafficking. Instead, they have been sent for processing on Nauru and
Manus Island, which is part of Papua New Guinea.
The Manus Island center was closed last October amid protests from its
inhabitants, who said they feared being attacked by local residents.
The situation in the Nauru detention center has reached a “crisis
point,” George Newhouse, the principal lawyer for the National Justice
Project, said in a phone interview.
Mr. Newhouse said that inpatient mental health care for children
detained on Nauru was nonexistent.
“These children live in hopelessness and despair, and we’ve observed
that it’s getting worse,” he said. “We are alarmed at the number of
children who are imminently at risk of harm or death.”
Some children have been on the island for nearly five years, he added.
“It’s just a matter of time before someone dies or is seriously
injured,” he said. “If that happens, Australia is responsible.”
In 2016, Australian immigration officials told lawmakers that 25 of 54
children who had recently been returned to Australia from Nauru had a
clinically diagnosed mental health condition.
The treatment of immigrant children in United States detention centers
has drawn global attention in recent weeks after President Trump’s
“zero tolerance” policy resulted in more than 2,300 children being
separated from their parents and other guardians at border crossings.
But critics of Australia’s immigration policy say the issue of what to
do with refugee and asylum-seeker children has been mishandled by
officials here for years.
According to the Australian Border Force, 255 people were in the Nauru
detention center at the end of April, 22 of them children. Since the
beginning of 2016, three men in their 20s detained on Nauru have died
from causes related to self-harm, including an Iranian asylum-seeker
last month-.
The Department of Home Affairs, which is responsible for immigration,
did not respond to a request for comment.
After a visit to Nauru this spring, Indrika Ratwatte, the United
Nations refugee agency’s director for Asia and the Pacific, said he
had found the state of the children there especially shocking, citing
the case of a 12-year-old girl.
“She was in bed, catatonic, not gotten out of that bed for a week, not
gotten out of that room for over a month,” he said, “and the father
was desperate as to what to do with this child.”