...Australia's treatment of vulnerable people who have sought its protection as refugees is contrary to the international prohibition on torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. I will then consider the extent to which Australian law has addressed the effect of immigration detention on mental health and comment on the ramifications of the policy

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Since 1992, Australia has maintained a regime of immigration detention. The Migration Act 1958 (Cth) assigns the descriptor 'unlawful non-citizen' to all persons within Australia's migration zone and who are without a valid visa. All persons known or reasonably suspected to be unlawful non-citizens must be detained pursuant to subsection 189(1) of the Act. Several thousand people have been detained in accordance with section 189(1). (1) Extensive research by health professionals has established that the experience of being held in immigration detention has a deleterious effect on detainees' mental health. (2) A consultant psychiatrist who examined a number of detainees held at South Australia's Baxter Detention Centre has made reference to the 'pervasive atmosphere of hopelessness' in 'an environment almost designed to produce mental illness'. (3) Another consultant psychiatrist considered that Baxter itself is unwell'. (4)

Australia's federal human rights body, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), has repeatedly linked immigration detention with serious mental illness (5) and in 2007 identified the length and uncertainty of detention as fundamental problems which 'inevitably lead to' mental harm. (6) The Commission noted that 'it does not take years of detention for mental health problems to begin ... HREOC staff met some detainees who were starting to suffer symptoms after just months of detention.' (7) Upon their release, detainees may be required to pay the costs of their detention pursuant to section 209 of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth). The resulting financial burden further inhibits their integration into the community and recovery from the trauma of detention.

Australia's detention centres have absorbed mentally ill Australian citizens, permanent residents and visa holders. Cornelia Rau, a mentally ill Australian permanent resident, was detained by the Immigration Department at the Brisbane Women's Correctional Centre and subsequently the Baxter Immigration Detention Facility for ten months. It is an absurd tragedy that Ms Rau was not identified by immigration officials or detention centre staff until a connection was made in February 2005 between her and media reports about a missing Australian woman.

Cornelia Rau is not the only mentally ill Australian to find have found her way into immigration detention. A 249 further cases involving the detention of vulnerable Australian citizens, permanent residents and visa holders have come to light, one of which involved three separate occasions of detention of a mentally ill Australian citizen for a total of 253 days. (8) Rather than receiving the treatment they require, these vulnerable individuals have languished in an environment in which disturbed behaviour has often been characterised as deliberately disruptive rather than a symptom of illness. The punitive effect of 'behaviour management' strategies designed to address such behaviour, combined with the failure to provide medical treatment, has further undermined the already compromised mental health of these vulnerable individuals.

The detention together of children and adults of both genders has increased women's and children's vulnerability to sexual assault and has generated fear which has manifested itself in mental harm. HREOC has detailed a number of cases in which women and children were routinely escorted to toilets by male family members because of a fear of assault. One officer employed at Woomera has reported as follows:

A [girl in her early teens] ... tried to kill herself because she could not cope with men pressuring her for sex. There is no women's and children's only compound at the detention centre, hence there was no escape from the threat of sexual abuse ... [Her] mother in rears and desperate told me how she and her daughter were subject to constant harassment because they were not accompanied by a man ... Staff reported [her] situation to in-house and government authorities yet the girl remains at Woomera ... (9)

In such an environment, the psychological burden has not been borne by detainees alone. A number of employees and contractors who have worked at the notorious Woomera facility, which was decommissioned in April 2003, were so distressed by the hopelessness and despair in their midst that they were themselves vulnerable to psychiatric illness. These workers were dubbed the 'care bears'. (10)

When he took on the role of managing the Woomera centre, Allan Clifton reported:

I saw the women and children and was told about the unaccompanied minors and single men. I sensed the unease ... There was no infrastructure. The gatehouse was a tent. The medical centre a shambles. Those people hadn't been charged with any crime other than being in Australian territorial waters. I looked at the kids, thinking about my own girls. (11)

After 18 months, Clifton reported: 'I was suicidal. I couldn't go out of the house. I couldn't get off the couch. I was basically a vegetable.' (12)

Dr Simon Lockwood sank into depression after working at Woomera for three years because of 'the sheer volume of distress that [he] saw and the experiences that [he] witnessed and just the nonsensical nature of it all, and the fact that [he] couldn't rationally explain it all.' (13) Staff, such as Lockwood, who display compassion for detainees are said to have been derided by staff members who are dubbed the 'gas and bash' contingent. These workers were largely sourced from the prison sector and were known for their hostile stance towards detainees. Their characterisation of detainees who invoked their lawful right to seek asylum as 'crims' echoed the Liberal/National Party government's demonisation of undocumented arrivals and its use of pejorative labels such as 'unlawfuls', 'queue-jumpers', and 'illegals'.

While the first group of workers at Woomera suffered from mental harm and in many cases developed post-traumatic stress disorder, the second group were also damaged by the immigration detention policy. Members of this second group became a stark manifestation of Australia's immigration policy by being rendered incapable of recognising the inherent dignity in the detainees. Their own humanity was thereby diminished.

Since 2001, immigration detention has extended beyond the Australian mainland to offshore centres such as Christmas Island, as well as Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Individuals processed offshore fall outside Australia's legal protection and are largely inaccessible to lawyers, community visitors or journalists. The despair experienced as a result of abandonment, isolation and hopelessness as to their future has led detainees to engage in frequent hunger strikes and acts of self-harm. A psychiatrist employed in Nauru expressed his observations over several months in the following terms: 'I seldom or never encounter an asylum seeker who still sleeps soundly and is able to enjoy life. Mental health, or psychiatry for that matter, is basically not equipped to improve their situation in any essential respect.' (14)

Since 2005, children and their families have been permitted to live within the community and a number of others have lived in the community pursuant to bridging visas. The Migration Amendment (Detention Arrangements) Act 2005 (Cth) provides that a minor shall only be detained as a measure of last resort. It further empowers the Immigration Minister to permit children and their families to reside outside the detention centre environment while deemed to be in detention for the purposes of the Migration...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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