Nauru rapes: ‘There is a war on women’MARTIN MCKENZIE-MURRAY
One woman lies catatonic in hospital after being raped and beaten. Another was raped and immolated. This is the world awaiting refugees released from detention on Nauru.
Camp conditions an abuse of power
We have built camps in our name that house damaged children, yet denude privacy and employ guards without background checks. Camps that encourage abuse, intimidation and the hypersexualisation of children. Camps that cannot provide nominal release dates to its subjects, creating purgatories. Camps that repel journalists with exaggerated visa fees, and punish detainees who speak to them distantly.
On Nauru, aid workers have been traumatised, discredited, sacked without explanation and had their exoneration ignored. We have criminalised their disclosure of child abuse. Have, in fact, created a distant exclusion zone for mandatory reporting; a black site whose governing legislation is a repudiation of our own laws. “If I see child abuse in Australia and I don’t report it, I can get into enormous trouble,” David Isaacs, a paediatrician, said last week. “If I see child abuse on Nauru and I do report it, I might go to prison for two years.”
We have created a camp where unvetted security guards enjoy the power that flows from the indifference of local police, and a situation where these guards can spy upon Australian senators and our government is not stirred to condemn it. It is a grievous hypocrisy. The men and women of this government, fat with ostensible love for our institutions, appear unmoved by former nightclub bouncers stalking its own parliament’s representatives. Apparently a defence of our institutions may only occur if in doing so it doesn’t imply a failure of policy.
We have established these camps in partnership with a corrupt government, the government of Nauru, so obscene in its cupidity that it squandered its status as one of the world’s richest nations per capita and now relies upon our immigration policy for income. A government that has largely exiled its political opposition and sacked its judiciary. A government that expelled its coroner – the Australian magistrate Peter Law – once he began an investigation into the strange and brutal death of the wife of its finance minister, David Adeang. This is worth detailing. In May 2013, Madelyn Adeang was found burnt to death in her garden. Law says no photos were taken of the scene, nor interviews conducted with neighbours. He also said that police were frightened of David Adeang. The finance minister insists it was an accident – that his wife was carrying fuel and unintentionally triggered her own immolation – but no investigation occurred.
We have created a settlement program where lone teenagers are released upon an island where their existence is detested, and they face no prospects of education or employment. By phone they tell me they are routinely assaulted, and send photos of their injuries. They say they would prefer the relative security of the camps.
It’s a settlement program that releases vulnerable single women to remote parts of the island, where they are preyed upon with impunity, and for whom justice is thwarted by their frightened reticence and a compromised police force. To this day, no convictions have been recorded for assaults on refugees.
In Australia, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection, and the minister’s office, did not respond to detailed questions about the sexual assaults reported in this piece and conditions on Nauru for settled refugees.
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