Opinion Articles

*Do we have to be cruel to children to protect our boundaries?
By Bryan Dunn
Bryan Dunn is the Director of Centacare Newcastle, the official welfare agency of the Catholic Church in the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle.

I recall as a little boy in the forties in Newcastle listening to the midday ABC News. The newsreader related the experiences of Australian prisoners under the Japanese. He described their suffering and humiliation. The details are too horrendous to repeat.

I was shocked at the time to think that people could be so cruel to others. Certainly I knew that Australians could never do cruel things like that. That idealistic belief I carried with me into adulthood. We are not cruel. We would not deliberately set out to hurt others much less, as government policy, use hurting children as a means of deterring others from finding refuge in our land.

Yet many ordinary Australians are led to believe that the policy of deterrence through cruelty is defensible; indeed, thoroughly right for our times. If not retained then the flood will come, abetted by the people smugglers.

Acquaintances may say, 'Send them back'. More often, I suspect, ordinary Australians are moved by the plight of the children but they feel caught between their real fear and a sense of compassion.

The response of the Minister for Immigration to the Human Rights Report on Children in Detention, A Last Resort, tapped into that fear. A fear of the leverage the children provide. She proposed that removing children from detention will encourage people smugglers.

Our compassion can be muted because the children and their situation remain unknown to us. They are not real children: twelve year olds like ours; or young emerging adolescents struggling to grow up like ours. Yet they are. No different from our young ones on the netball courts or rugby fields on Saturday morning.

It is to this feeling of being caught between two positions that I appeal. In the face of that conflict between fear and compassion, we remain silent and allow fear to justify our caution. What we lack is opportunity for open discussion that recognizes both the wrong we instinctively believe is being done, and the fear we share about security and future.

What are the realities? Under current Child Protection provisions in NSW a child must be protected from risk of harm. The relevant Act defines the nature of abuse and neglect. Under certain conditions a child can be removed from situations where they occur. The Inquiry Report (Chapter 8) noted that the state authority's powers in that regard do not extend to detention centres.

There is overwhelming evidence in the Report that children were exposed to physical and mental risk of harm in contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

I recall as a parent the shock of seeing my fourteen year old son lying on a rugby field with a suspected spinal injury. The Saturday morning crowd of parents and others was hushed. The ambulance paramedics and specialists were caring and expert. Despite the fact that our son had the best treatment available anywhere our pain as parents was acute. Compare that to the experience of so many young people and their parents whose stories are told in A Last Resort.

The context of their experience was an isolated, prison-like environment with no ready access to specialist care for their sons - afflicted physically and mentally and in some cases so profoundly distressed that they tried to take their lives.

Shagin Adgar was a fourteen year old in detention in Port Hedland in 2001. His 'sore eyes' were not properly attended to over a period of nine months; his auto immune system problem was not diagnosed. He became blind in one eye and yet was returned to isolated detention despite the protests of medical specialists.

Dr Bill Glasson, the President of the Australian Medical Association, himself an ophthalmologist, added his voice to those worried that this case is not unrepresentative.

Dr Glasson states that the 'system's not working... we must make sure that they can access the same medical care as we'd expect for any other Australian'.

As parents we surely understand the pain of these parents witnessing the deterioration of their children's health despite expert intervention being available. We repudiate a system which has failed the needs of children at almost every turn.

Whatever our fears we need to discuss them in the context of our fundamental responsibility and our instinctive concern for children - these children, all children. We do not have to be cruel to children to protect our boundaries.

*This article was published in The Newcastle Herald, 20th May 2004.