Psychologist lifts the lid on detention centres

PAPUA NEW GUINEA – An Australian psychologist says the conditions he witnessed at the Manus Island and Nauru offshore detention centres are the most demoralising he has ever seen in his 43-year career.

Psychologist and trauma expert Paul Stevenson has treated field trauma for 25 years – including in the aftermath of the Bali bombings and the Boxing Day tsunami – and visited the Manus Island and Nauru offshore detention centres on 16 occasions, for two to three weeks at a time, between 2014 and 2015.

He says the Australian government is deliberately inflicting upon people the worst trauma he has ever seen.

In an interview with the Guardian, Stevenson, whose job in the centres was to counsel the Wilson Security guards and follow up with officers involved in every situation for which an incident report was filed.

“In my entire career of 43 years I have never seen more atrocity than I have seen in the incarcerated situations of Manus Island and Nauru.

“There was everything from self-harm, suicide threats, actual suicide,” he said.

“There were all manner of altercations involving fights and disruptions, there were protests, there were people coming back from the community intoxicated and alcohol-fuelled incidents as well.

“There’s a lot of domestic violence, there’s issues of sexual abuse, and there’s abuse of children.”

Stevenson explained that when faced with trauma, particularly involving natural disasters and terrorist attacks, “we see a range of reactions in people.”

“Some people take on the most amazing resilience and others engage in acts of bravery,” he said.

“There are all kinds of positive stories that come out of disasters – when the chips are down and when people are really stretched to the limit. But the difference in Nauru is that none of this applies.

“We don’t see any of those positives, we don’t see the best of human nature, we only see the worst. We only see the complete desperation and demoralisation all the time, there’s a sense of hopelessness.

“We don’t see these acts of bravery and these acts of resilience, we just see people being more and more demoralised every single day and it never changes.”

Stevenson recalled the day that Immigration Minister Peter Dutton visited Nauru.

“He was there for less than 24 hours. We put on a big breakfast for him. All the chefs lined up, and we decorated one part of the mess hall, and we had this big tropical themed breakfast for him,” he said.

“The senior management escorted him around the centre to see the places that they wanted him to see. Peter Dutton has absolutely no idea what it’s like to be there.

“People don’t understand that about $5 billion per year goes into offshore detention to keep fewer than 2000 people out of the country, I think that’s obscene.”

Stevenson is the president of the Australian Democrats Queensland branch and is standing in Australia’s federal election as an independent.

He told the Guardian that he doesn’t know whether his slim electoral chances for a Senate seat will be helped or harmed by speaking about what he has seen inside Australia’s offshore detention centres.

But he says he feels it is necessary to tell those at home the truth about regional processing, “because I believe in our democracy.”

“I’ve really been telling this story ever since I entered politics 10 years ago, but it just culminated two weeks before this election and it’s never been listened to two weeks before any other of the other three elections that I’ve done before this.”

- ABC/PNC