Aussies' Secret Child Torture Program

The girl’s picture is not unusual in the dark secretive hell Australia has created for people forced to flee their homes to survive. What Australians do to child refugees is among worst treatments of any western nation, according to reports by an organizer educator who has worked with social movements in the United States and South Africa. The report is so disturbing and passionate, after reading it, it’s tough to imagine ever viewing Aussies the same. It was written a year ago. Today, some of the 32,000 refugees get a second option: to be exploited in Australia’s hostile outback, say critics of a new program. It may, however, be the most compassionate solution to globalization’s forced refugee crisis.

“Australia routinely throws asylum seekers into prisons, mostly in remote areas or, even better, on islands,” reports Dan Moshenberg in his scathing report on Aussies’ complicity in torturing caged child refugees.

[Watch LEAKY BOATS documentary below.]

Among `detained’ asylum seekers, children represent the greatest percentage of self-harm and suicidal behavior, according to Gillian Triggs, President of Australia’s Human Rights Commission in the commission’s Forgotten Children report on children in immigration detention. Triggs says that between January 2013 and March 2014, 128 self-harm incidents by children in detention, numbers “shockingly high.”

“The numbers are high. The stories are heartbreaking. The pictures drawn by children are devastating,” Moshenberg says. “One girl draws her own portrait. It’s a close up of her face, pressed against bars. Her eyes are blue, her tears, streaming down her face, are blood red.”

According to Moshenberg, all the cildren’s self-portraits are similar: children crying, all in cages.

“Doctors and others report that children can’t sleep, suffer trauma, regress, suffer clinical depression, self-harm, and die inside,” he says.

No “Shock”

“There is no shock here,”  Moshenberg writes. “This has been Australia’s public policy for over a decade, and the policy has only worsened.

“Children are being held for significantly greater periods of time than has been the case in the past, and that leads virtually inevitably to greater levels of mental health disturbance,” Triggs reported – “Leads virtually inevitably to greater levels of mental health disturbance, Moshenberg adds.

“Just call it ordinary torture, and be done. The delivery of medical services is worse than toxic, and the stays get longer and longer.”

Australia is holdsing over 1,000 children in “closed immigration detention.”  The longer those children remain in “closed immigration detention”, the more likely they will suffer mental health crises and the more severe those crises will be.

“Is it acceptable to have children held on Christmas Island in shipping bunkers, containers, on stony ground, surrounded by phosphate dust in that heat?” Triggs asked this week at an Australian Human Rights Commission hearing.

The government representative replied, “The last time I looked, president, there was no shipping container. They are containerised accommodation, they are not shipping containers.”

Unfortunately, “containerised accommodation” does clarify everything. The State sees these children as less than less than human, according to Moshenberg.

“A child will die in one of those cages, and that child will have been a human. Perception matters, as Australia’s women asylum seekers and their children well know. Torture matters. The torture of children matters. Children matter. Tell Australia, and tell all the nations of the world that throwing asylum seeking children into cages. Children matter. It’s not shocking.”

New Compassionate Solution