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Women in Immigration Detention: more questions than answers - Eva Cox and Terry Priest, University of Technology Sydney, August 2005
The following paper details some of the ways in which Immigration Detention Facilities are administered and how the system can cover up abuses of the basic rights and needs of detainees. Any closed system can be mismanaged, even where there is good will and no wrong intentions.
'The original intention of this paper was to focus on the needs of women asylum seekers who had arrived by boat and were being held in Immigration Detention Facilities (IDFs) in Australia. Over the time we have been working on the paper fewer of these women have arrived by these means and most of those in detention have been released, albeit often only on Temporary Protection Visas. During this time, there has been an increasing awareness that there are other groups of women, often with children, who are being held in detention because of visa problems, including visa over stayers, so we expanded our research to examine the situations that all women face in immigration detention facilities.
This paper should be used to put some serious questions on the public agenda about the care of women in IDFs, and the particular risks they face. While we hope women will no longer be held in immigration detention at all, we recognise that this is likely. So we would prefer IDFs that can meet the particular needs of women that are open about how these needs are met, and are subject to formal, independent processes of scrutiny. The Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) hopes this paper is the starting point for debate about the need for a more open, honest, accountable and transparent system.'
Published with permission of the authors.
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