Weeks after Scott Morrison became immigration minister in September 2013, a 17-year-old Iraqi boy at the Manus Island detention centre alleged he was “on a list” of a group of Iranian men who planned to gang rape him.
He was moved to another compound, but lived in fear at the camp until three months later, when he decided to voluntarily return to Iraq.
A week after he made the allegations, and more than 2,000km away, in November 2013, two staff at the Nauru detention centre raised the alarm about serious allegations that a cleaner had touched the genitals of a young boy in detention.
The cleaner grabbed his own genitals and said “jiggy jiggy” when the asylum seeker fought back. He later “started talking and laughing” to the asylum seeker after he was confronted by the guards. The boy continues to suffer from trauma from the event. The cleaner has not been charged by the Nauru police force.
The threats escalated. The assaults continued.
But it was not until October 2014 – almost a year after these early assaults were documented – that a review into allegations of assaults on Nauru was undertaken to examine the broader institutional responses.
These two assaults, early on in the tenure of the Abbott government, should have put the immigration department on notice that there was something very wrong happening in these remote detention centres.
But no action was taken to examine the systemic issues surrounding sexual violence in detention centres on Manus Island, Nauru and the mainland until much later.
Evidence gathered by Guardian Australia highlights the systemic failures in how the immigration department and contractors have responded to serious allegations.
Clinical advice by those who know best about responding to sexual assaults – doctors and psychiatrists – has been ignored. In one case, the immigration department even delayed allowing the medical contractor to report a serious allegation of sexual assault. Continue reading
Sources
- The Guardian
- Image: Demotix
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