Over 60 lande i verden tilbageholder børn, der er flygtet eller indvandret til landet, i fængsler eller lukkede lejre. Det kan give varig stress og traumer, siger en læge, mens andre slet og ret betegner det som børnemishandling.
BANGKOK, 21 October 2014 (IRIN): An increasing number of migrant children are being detained in countries where they are seeking asylum despite a growing body of scientific evidence that such incarceration leads to long-term psychological and developmental difficulties.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2013 declared detaining migrant children is “never in [children’s] best interests and is not justifiable” and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says it should be conducted with an “ethic of care – and not enforcement”.
However, according to a June 2014 article in The Lancet, more than 60 countries detain migrant children, which causes “deleterious effects on children’s mental, developmental, and physical health”.
So when, in response to a recent surge in migrant children, the US was discovered to be detaining large numbers of migrant children, analysts flayed the tactic.
Between October 2013 and September 2014, 68,541 unaccompanied minors were apprehended along the southern border, a 77 percent increase on the previous year; 70 percent reported they were held for more than the legally-allowed 72 hours.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) argued: “a wide variety of research studies link immigration detention with mental health consequences for children, including harm that lasts beyond the period of detention.”
Consequences for health
And when Australia, home to the notorious Operation Sovereign Borders programme, announced on 19 August 2014 that it would release some migrant children from detention, the plan’s limitations – an arrival cut-off date of 19 July 2013, and age limit of 10 years – drew criticism that the move might, in fact, exacerbate mental health problems.
Karen Zwi, a paediatrician and head of the Community Child Health department at Australia’s Sydney Children’s Hospital, said the new release plan “will affect only 16 percent of those currently in locked detention”, arguing it could “heighten the despair of the other 745 (84 percent) children who have been excluded from the release.”
“What we see in children in detention is a huge range of adverse childhood experiences (ACE) for a prolonged period of time,” Zwi told IRIN, referring to ACEs, which the UN World Health Organization (WHO) defines as: “some of the most intensive and frequently occurring sources of stress that children may suffer”, ranging from neglect to violence.
“The more of those that you are exposed to, the worse your outcome in adulthood is in terms of physical and mental health,” Zwi said.
Evidence mounting
A 2014 study published in the Medical Journal of Australia found that the majority of a representative sample of the country’s paediatricians “consider mandatory detention a form of child abuse”.
Even among the 18 percent of respondents who “strongly approved” of detention of children in general, 92 percent said “detention of asylum-seeker children and their families is a form of child abuse.”
Evidence of the long-term impacts of child abuse is mounting: a 2014 statistical analysis by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) found that abuse in childhood, including mental violence inflicted by conditions of detention, can have adverse impacts on educational achievement and personal income, and cause “damage at the societal level, including direct and indirect costs due to increased social spending and lost economic productivity”.
For example, a 2013 study estimated the economic cost of child abuse in East Asia and the Pacific to exceed US$160 billion.
Today there are more forced migrants (51.2 million) than at any point since World War II, according to UNHCR – the majority from Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia.
Half of them are children; at least 25,000 unaccompanied migrant children filed asylum claims in 2013.
According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), global migrants increased from 154 million in 1990 to 232 million in 2013. The International Detention Coalition (IDC) says states are increasingly responding by detaining migrants, and the NGO Coalition on Migration estimates one million migrant children are affected by detention globally.
Exposure to violence
Læs resten af artiklen hos IRIN News
