A last resort?
National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention
The Convention on the Rights of the Child is very clear that extra efforts must be taken to provide children with disabilities with the support they need to enjoy a 'full and decent life'.
The Inquiry closely examined the services provided to two families with children with serious disabilities. These families were held in immigration detention centres between 2000 and 2003 - one family was in Port Hedland, the other was in Curtin.
Despite the efforts of individual staff members and the significant improvements over 2002, evidence to the Inquiry demonstrated that in the case of these two families there was a failure to provide:
- prompt access to State disability and child welfare services to assist with the identification of children with disabilities
- prompt development of comprehensive individual case management plans
- prompt provision of aids and adaptations, such as a wheelchair and eating utensils
- prompt provision of suitable educational programs conducted by qualified staff
- prompt provision of recreational programs tailored to the individual needs of the children
- adequate support to help parents cope with the stress of caring for children with disabilities in detention.
The longer children with disabilities are held in immigration detention the greater the impact of these problems will be. Whilst the Inquiry acknowledges that providing services to children with disabilities in remote detention centres is extremely challenging, the Department has the power to release these families or transfer them to facilities that are better placed to meet their needs.
The Department failed to promptly consider any alternative options to detention for these children with disabilities.
CASE STUDY
A family, including two boys and a girl, aged 7, 11 and 13, arrived in Australia in August 2000. The children had aspartylglucosaminuria (AGU) which creates an intellectual disability. The family was initially detained in the Port Hedland detention centre and was later transferred to the Villawood detention centre in September 2003.
The exact nature of the disability of the three children was not determined until August 2002 - two years after the family arrived in Australia. While this is not always an easy problem to diagnose, the evidence before the Inquiry suggests that there were no serious efforts to commence the diagnostic process until seven months after this family's arrival in Australia. Furthermore, there was slow follow-up once the process started.
The children did not receive the appropriate case management, education, recreation and other support and assistance they needed. The difficulty of providing specialist services in a remote detention facility contributed to this failure. For instance a teacher from the Port Hedland centre described the challenges of trying to provide a positive education experience for them in the detention environment:
There were two support detainees in the class that I was teaching in and we just tried to keep them going with very simplified work and quite often the other children would rile the smaller boy as it was very easy to do that and he would jump on tables and start screaming out and run round the classroom. It was very difficult to know what to do, I guess. After a while I developed some techniques … But it was another area – it was yet another level to deal with in that classroom and the people working with me were untrained. They were very humane and very good with the children, excellent actually, but they weren’t trained in any – in that specialist area.
The family were released on permanent refugee protection visas in December 2003 – three years and four months after first being taken into detention.
Inquiry finding
The Commonwealth breached the Convention on the Rights of the Child by failing to ensure a ‘full and decent life’ for children with disabilities in detention and by failing to ensure they received the special care and assistance they required.