Today the Guardian is publishing 2,000 leaked incident reports from Australia’s off-shore detention camp for asylum seekers on Nauru. More than 51% of these incidents involve children, despite children constituting only 18% of those in detention for the period covered by reports.

Incidents range from self-harm to sexual abuse to physical assaults to cruelty.

How many times in Australia will we report on the abuse and mistreatment of children in institutional care before we finally learn from our mistakes?

The treatment meted out to the stolen generations led to Bringing Them Home report in 1997.

The Nauru files: 2,000 leaked reports reveal scale of abuse of children in Australian offshore detention Read more

Aboriginal deaths in custody lead to a royal commission between 1987 and 1991.

Forced adoption led to a Senate report, Commonwealth Contribution to Former Forced Adoption Policies and Practices in 2012.

The royal commission into institutional responses to sexual abuse, established in 2013, has produced three reports to date. Still under way, the commission had documented the horrific sexual abuse of thousands of children in state or state-sponsored care.

Various state governments have held inquiries and investigations into child protection, children in out-of-home care and disability services to uncover abuse, neglect and system failures.

And now the Turnbull government, sparked by harrowing footage from the Don Dale youth detention centre, is establishing a royal commission into the Northern Territory juvenile justice system.

All these reports. All these damaged children. All on our nation’s watch. All on our consciences.

Each report is in a different context. All teach us similar lessons.

Abuse and mistreatment occurs when absolute power is wielded over vulnerable people. Abuse is most easily undertaken when the victims have been dehumanised, especially on the basis of their race, disability, gender or economic class.

Abuse flourishes systematically when information doesn’t flow transparently. Without oversight, monitoring and independent reporting, or where there are ineffective or no whistleblower protections, there is little chance for mistreatment to come to light. When vulnerable young people have limited access to family or other advocates, or when the media has poor or no access to institutional care or information about it, abuse can continue for years unchecked.

Publicly, in many of these circumstances, politicians and other authorities continue to assert that everything is just fine.

Like the politicians who told us nothing was amiss at the Don Dale juvenile detention centre. Goings-on there apparently didn’t even pique their interest.

Australia’s track record looking after children in institutional or state care is poor, and our failures continue to the present day.

Knowing all this, even before the Guardian’s revelations today, how can Australians look at the situation of asylum seeker and refugee children detained by the Australian government on Nauru and assume everything is just fine?

If our governments can’t assure the safety and wellbeing of young Australian citizens detained on our own soil in the Northern Territory, how can our nation be trusted with the lives of refugee and asylum seeker children we are detaining offshore?

In fact we have ample evidence that the children on Nauru are anything but “just fine”. The Guardian’s release of the incident reports today confirms the Human Rights Commission’s 2014 report The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention. It found that of 1,129 asylum seeker children detained by the Australian government there have been:

233 assaults



33 reported sexual assaults

128 incidences of self-harm

34% who require psychiatric support

Children on Nauru are at risk to all the circumstances that previous reports tell us foster a culture of abuse:

They are vulnerable – some are even alone without family – and trapped in indefinite detention.

They are dehumanised, serving no other function except as a human warning system to other would-be asylum seekers.

They are isolated and hidden from our view, with no independent oversight and no ability for advocates to speak on their behalf.

Australia, we could actually show we’ve learned something from all these previous inquiries and reports, and take action now.

For example, we must demand the government appoint a children’s commissioner for Nauru who can independently monitor and report on the wellbeing of children on the island. We must insist the government makes reporting abuse in offshore detention mandatory. We must advocate the government overturn the laws silencing healthcare professionals and others from speaking out about children on Nauru.

Those things aren’t enough, but each would be a good start.

The best outcome, of course, would be to remove children from Nauru. Is there a politician left in Canberra with the decency and heart to stand up and for these forgotten, abused, victimised children?

I’ve argued previously that we will have a royal commission one day into offshore detention. It might not be for a decade or more, I said, and our children and grandchildren will wonder how we all let it happen.

Are more than 1,000 reports of cruelty and abuse of children enough to make us act now? Or will we just wait a decade to read the inevitability shameful findings of another royal commission into historical patterns of institutional abuse of children?