A Ripple Effect of Suffering

A new report by the University of Sydney and the Australian Human Rights Commission highlights the impacts on children and young people when their parents and caregivers are placed in immigration detention or deported. The report centres the voices and perspectives of children and young people ‘growing up in the shadow of Australia’s immigration detention and deportation systems’. The report found children and young people experiencing severe emotional and financial distress as a result of parental detention or deportation, who were often facing food poverty and housing insecurity, their lives upended as they faced choices of relocation or separation. Children and young people self-reported feelings of sadness, abandonment, shame, disconnection and anger. The report documents that Australia’s immigration detention and deportation laws and policies ‘inflict profound and unnecessary harm not only on the people directly targeted, but also on their families and children’ and called for urgent reform.

Read it here