The daily life of a child in detention (2003)
Naina’s story
The daily life of a child in detention (2003)
I have a friend who calls me twice a week. Well, actually, she calls me when she can get to a telephone and I call her back. We aim to talk every Wednesday and Saturday night at 8pm her time, 10pm mine. Naina lives in an institution where there are 2 telephones for all the people who live there. I think there are more than 100 people. At one stage there were more than 400, but some of them have been moved on now. They’ve gone to other institutions, or to worse places.
My friend’s name is Naina and she’s 15. She’s been living in these institutions, in Australia, since she was 11. She’s a beautiful young woman and very, very clever. English is her second language, but she comes top in her class in lots of subjects, especially maths and science. Naina goes to a small Catholic school across the road from the detention centre at Port Hedland. She is in a co-ed year 10 class. I understand there are about 30 people in her year. She isn’t surprised that she is good at maths and science: her mum is a nurse and went to university when she was a girl. She was good at maths and science too. Naina would like to go to university, but she doesn’t like to plan too far in advance. She’s often been disappointed.
Naina lives with her mum and her little sister. She’s a tough big sister and says her little sister lacks discipline. I’ve met her little sister, Saima, and I think she’s just a little girl, doing things little girls do. Saima’s bilingual too – she switches easily between Farsi and English and has a wicked sense of humour. Naina says she is lazy at school, but I think I was lazy when I was 11 too, so I’m not holding that against her. She had a friend in Iran who gave her a stuffed rabbit for her 6th birthday. She misses that rabbit. She doesn’t know what happened to it. She hopes her grandma is keeping it safe for her.
Naina and Naina’s mum looks after them when they are sick and comforts them when they are sad and scared, but she can’t cook for them. They eat their meals in a communal dining room with all the other people they live with. People from all over the world – well, that’s not entirely true, there are no Austrian people, French or North American people; not any white people at all actually. They are a community of the poor and oppressed, they come from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sri Lanka, China – just to name a few. Chicken and rice, chicken and rice. Naina and Naina are really over chicken and rice.
Naina, their mum, is desperate to do what’s right for her daughters. However, she has a son too. He’s 19 and missing somewhere in Iran. No one knows where he is, or if he’s alive. It is hard for her to be brave and strong for the girls when she is so horribly worried about the fate of their brother.
Last week, Naina called on Thursday instead of Wednesday night. She sounded horribly depressed – which is unusual for her, she is generally unwaveringly optimistic and resilient. She was at the end of a period of two weeks of punishment because she swore at a guard. All her privileges had been taken from her. That meant that she wasn’t allowed to go on an excursion to the swimming pool last weekend – her only escape from the walls that imprison her.
She was concerned that she may not be allowed to go to a ‘Ball’ that had been planned in Port Hedland for Saturday night. It was a 13- to 17-year-old disco, the type organised by police or community groups, and she’d been looking forward to it for months. It would be the only social outing she’d been to in the three years she’s been in immigration detention in Western Australia.
We talked about the things we normally talk about. Current debate in parliament on refugee issues (my topic), growing pains and getting on with your mother when you are 15 (her topic), where I was at in terms of gaining support for their case and engaging an immigration lawyer to work on it, I told her to be brave and call when she could. She said she wouldn’t promise to call on Saturday night because she hoped to be at the ‘Ball’.
She didn’t call Saturday night and I was so pleased for her that obviously she had served her ‘punishment’ and was allowed to go to the dance. She called on Sunday. Happy again and with more hope in her voice than she’d expressed on Thursday and told me she had indeed been allowed to go. Fantastic, I said, were your friends from school there?
Oh no! she explained, as though we live on different planets. Aboriginal children go to the Ball – and us. Australian people don’t like to go to things with Aboriginals and refugees. My friends’ parents don’t let them go to things where Aboriginals are. White people don’t do the same things as us.
What has happened to our country? How did this happen? My 15 year old friend Naina, holed up in Port Hedland Detention Centre, is more cognisant of the culture in which we are living in that I am. It occurred to me then, that she has accepted racism as a core Australian value. Why wouldn’t she? She lives in a jail in a place that is more than 17 hours by road from Perth. Her jailers, or officers, as she calls them, are without exception non-indigenous Australians – however nearly 15% of the Port Headland population are indigenous. She’s a smart kid, she can do the sums.
Despite the difficulties, I still have to believe we live in a civilized country where families like Naina’s will one day have a place. They have already won two Federal Court appeals, which have been disregarded by the Refugee Review Tribunal, but have another shot at the full Federal Court in August. There are still interventions that can be made on humanitarian grounds. I can wait and continue to work at having them freed, but I don’t know how much longer they can. This will be their third Christmas in detention. If the process continues in its current vein it’s not unreasonable to expect that Naina and her sister will have spent their entire teenage years in immigration detention in the remote Australian desert.
Naina, her mother and sister have almost given up hope that they will ever be released from detention. They are starting to have the view that they will either die there, or be forcibly returned to Iran where they will meet unmentionable persecution, which they consider worse than a lifetime in Port Hedland Immigrant and Refugee Processing Centre (IRPC). I’ve been to the Port Hedland IRPC and it’s horrible – the alternative must be beyond imagining.
This story isn’t about a place, far away, this is happening right now, in Australia. In our supposedly civilised, democratic country. Please, tell your friends this story. The more people who know about it, and are sympathetic to these issues, the more difficult it will be for the government to continue this policy of indefinite mandatory detention.
Virginia
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Some of the names of the people in this story have been changed to protect them.