Drawings by child detainees gives a chilling insight into the suffering being inflicted upon them in Australia's name
An alarming aspect of the pictures drawn by children detained on Christmas Island, and revealed by the Human Rights Commission's national investigation into their plight, is what is blanked out – the children’s boat IDs. In every detention facility I have visited, children sign their artworks with this ID; they respond to this ID; they know each other’s ID numbers. The institutionalisation of these children is all-pervasive and will take a very long time to recover from if they are ever released into society.
The sadness and pleas in these drawings are fairly evident, sometimes literal. “I need your help. ples help me” says the speech bubble above the girl with curly hair. A child is crying out for help, pleading to strangers. Parents know they cannot help their own children. These drawings show the complete breakdown of the family unit.
Inside detention, parents are stripped of the right to make nearly every basic decision about their child: what will he or she eat, shall I set a nice family table for dinner, what type of education will my child receive, what will he or she wear? Cultural norms cannot play out, and adults break without a purpose. Children with broken parents suffer - they create drawings calling out to strangers.
Nearly every drawing references bars. Successive governments have gone to great lengths to tell us that there is no longer razor wire at facilities; that where possible, Christmas Island included, fences are relatively low. Sometimes it is the type of fencing you would see at a residential building site. It makes no difference: the children are trapped, they are held captive and their drawings reflect this. Overbearing bars, giant locks, guards with keys on their belts. It looks repressive because it is. It looks terrifying from the eyes of a child: uniforms, places you cannot go, restrictions that hold you in a place filled with suffering. The low fence may as well be a 50ft concrete wall topped with broken glass.
Even the sun is locked up. The sun shines but it cries.
This is the perfect metaphor for these children. I was recently in a detention facility where a staff member pointed to a child of around four playing in a sandpit. "Isn’t she cute?" remarked the staff member. The child’s eyes were vacant. She was mindlessly digging and could not hold our gaze; her play showed no joy or even amusement. Yes, the child was cute but it was obvious that inside she was crying.
In one drawing a child shows herself and many other children in the periphery all held in by a huge padlock. Another drawing shows two girls holding hands. Drawings by detained children quite often show many children. These kids are not alone. People looking in often think "the kids would be fine, they’ve got each other, kids find the positive in any situation". That may be the truth for the first few weeks of detention but as time goes on and the realisation that they are not going anywhere sinks in, children are not immune to the anguish. They see their friends depressed and families withdrawing, spending more time in their small rooms. Children worry and take their cues from one another. Time and time again we see children draw sad groups, collections of broken people. They mourn their own lost freedom but also feel grief for their friend who is not as much fun to play with as she once was, for the child they saw crying in the dining room.
Sometimes children in detention draw flowers. When we visit they often give us something sweet. One boy explained this to me. “You are nice people, you visit us, we don’t want to make you sad.”
theguardian.com
