While the last children were released from locked detention at the end of 2018, Australian law and policy still mandate detention for children arriving without visas. While the government refers to “held” or “locked” “detention”, to be plain, these children were imprisoned for seeking asylum.
We have just published a study describing the health of asylum-seeker children who experienced detention attending our Refugee Health Clinic over the past ten years.
Our team has been seeing refugee children for more than 20 years. We have extensive experience in refugee health, forensic medicine and child development, but nothing prepared us for the complexity of looking after these children.