Trigger warning: This post contains details of physical and mental abuse and self-harm.
Paul Stevenson has worked in the aftermath of natural disasters, terrorist attacks and mass shootings.
He assisted victims of the Bali Bombings, survivors of the Port Arthur massacre and the Boxing Day tsunamis.
And yet, in more than four decades working as a psychologist specialising in trauma, he says nothing he has seen compares to the horrors Australia is inflicting on refugees and asylum seekers in our offshore detention facilities.
“In my entire career of 43 years I have never seen more atrocity than I have seen in the incarcerated situations of Manus Island and Nauru,” he told The Guardian in an exclusive report published today.
From 2014 to 2015, Stevenson visited Manus Island and Nauru 14 times in his role as counsellor for the Wilson security staff, but it necessitated an understanding of the situation for the 1,500 former boat arrivals in their care.
According to official incident reports seen by The Guardian, during Stevenson’s time in the Pacific, six unaccompanied boys on Nauru tried to kill themselves with razor blades.
A three-year-old boy was allegedly molested by a guard, but his mother was too terrified to report it until months later.
A woman attempted to kill herself seven times in three weeks and threatened to kill her own daughter.
Another woman stuck on Nauru with her young son, facing the prospect of permanent separation from her husband in Australia, carved the words “releases the feelings in my heart and I feel better” into her chest.
A man, carved open his own stomach because he was not allowed to see or speak with his cousin and a woman, found naked and distressed, claiming to have been sexually assaulted, was taken to the police station instead of a doctor.
Eva Orner’s film Chasing Asylum is a must-see for all Australians (post continues after video):
“Every day is demoralising. Every single day and every night. And you can work an eight-hour shift, or a 16-hour-shift, or a 20-hour-shift, you can get up in the middle of the night to answer the calls to go down to the camp, and you know it’s not getting any better,” Stevenson said.
Most of the guards on Manus Island and Nauru come from a military background and many are simply there to work and make money, Stevenson says.
“People who are very compassionate and concerned about their work burn out pretty quickly.
“It does become very normal and people become very desensitised to it … so we find that even amongst the guards, there’s a desensitisation to a whole range of traumas.
“If there’s six or so [suicide attempts] in a day, then you’re starting to get an attrition about that.”
Post-traumatic stress disorder in detention is rife and cannot be successfully treated because it is the nature of detention itself which causes it, Stevenson says.
“This is what detention does to people … It turns them against themselves to use themselves as currency. And that’s a very very significant level of traumatisation, when somebody does that. All they have is their own body to negotiate with. If we’re in any way supporting the development of that very, very mentally unstable phenomena we need to do something about that.”
Children in the Nauru detention facility. Source: Refugee Action Collective (Victoria)
He says unlike other trauma situations he's attended, there's no glimmer of hope for those in detention who are constantly monitored, even while they sleep and are in the shower.
Family structures break down and children either ignore the authority of their parents because they know that guards hold the real power or they replicate desperate behaviours, including self-harm.
For their birthdays, the children ask for keys, because they are a symbol of freedom.
"You don’t see the positive glimpses, you don’t see the strength of resilience, you don’t see the quirky little things that people do when the chips are down, you don’t see the laughter and you don’t see the bravery, and you don’t see any of those things that give hope for improvement in the lives of these people.
"[It’s] that demoralisation that is the paramount feature of offshore detention. It’s indeterminate, it’s under terrible, terrible conditions, and there is nothing you can say about it that says there’s some positive humanity in this. And that’s why it’s such an atrocity."
Feature image: Refugee Action Collective (Victoria) on Facebook
Top Comments
Was probably worth mentioning he is a political candidate.
ACA certainly cleared up that feature photo nicely didn't they.
But they weren't born on the same patch of dirt that I was, so therefore do not deserve the same rights as I do. They deserve to be locked up in our concentration camps because they skipped an imaginary queue and they aren't real refugees anyway, they are 'economic' refugees, even if they are fleeing war effected countries or countries that have little human rights and have had to run away because they will be killed if they stay there.They should go back to the war torn crap hole they fled from, because I don't care what happens to people who have different coloured skin than I do. They aren't proper humans like us white, reasonable people in the west, anyway. Plus, they all sit on welfare and take our jobs and can't be educated to a white standard, just like all those Italians and Greeks and Vietnamese who came here in decades past.........Nup, they deserve to be locked up, Australia is only protecting her borders and Nauru is like a holiday camp compared to where they came from! They should be grateful we lock them up with no hope and no compassion to the point of self harm, with inadequate food and health care and where the prison guards rape and bash the inmates..... As for the children in detention, well, their parents should have just stayed in the war torn crap hole and not brought them on a leaky boat to try and find safety and a better life that we take for granted because we were lucky enough to be born in this general area and not another one. Well done Australia, the lucky country and home of the fair go.
Nailed it Laura, we are unwilling to accept the fallout of a Big crusading Christian country invading another country.
You might need to do a bit more research regarding your stupid comment about Italians, Greeks and Vietnamese immigrants. All of these "ethnic" groups are some of the most hardworking, honest group of people you would be lucky to know. Not a single one of these groups of people have demanded "special" treatment. They have all integrated successfully into a western lifestyle and no one demanded the "we" change for them. Sadly the same cannot be said for some of our recent arrivals.
I'd rather Christian over Islamic any day thanks. I have daughters to think about.
Ah, the power of propaganda.
You might want to do a bit more research. I work with 'recent arrivals'. They are wonderful, hardworking, grateful people who want the opportunity to be Australian.