Exclusive: In his 43-year career, Paul Stevenson has worked in the aftermath of the Bali bombings and the Boxing Day tsunami but says nothing he witnessed was as bad as the treatment of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus
by Ben Doherty and David Marr
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.”
Paul Stevenson has had a life in trauma. The psychologist and traumatologist has spent 40 years helping people make sense of their lives in the aftermath of disaster, of terrorist attacks, bombings and mass murders, of landslides, fires and tsunamis.
He’s written a book about his experiences, Postcards from Ground Zero, and for his efforts in assisting the victims of the Bali bombings, the Australian government pinned an Order of Australia Medal to his chest.
Now, he says, it is the Australian government deliberately inflicting upon people the worst trauma he has ever seen.
Over 2014 and 2015, Stevenson made 14 “deployments” – as they are called in the militarised argot of those secretive worlds offshore – to Manus Island andNauru, where about 1,500 asylum seekers who tried to arrive in Australia by boat are held on behalf of the Australian government. His role was to counsel and care for the mental health of the Wilson Security guards.
Stevenson is president of the Queensland branch of the Australian Democrats. The party is not registered in the state, so he is standing in this federal election as an independent, with the support of his party. He doesn’t know whether his slim electoral chances for a Senate seat – “somewhere between zero and a half” – will be helped or harmed by speaking to the Guardian. But he says he feels it is incumbent on those who have been inside Australia’s offshore detention centres to tell those at home the truth about regional processing.
He says he approached the Guardian, compelled by conscience to speak, “because I believe in our democracy”.
Over a career spanning decades Stevenson has worked with the survivors of the Port Arthur massacre, the Thredbo landslide, the Boxing Day Indian Ocean tsunami, the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005. He has counselled diplomats after embassies were bombed, and families who have lost loved ones to bushfires and floods. Stevenson says that the great privilege – “the joy, even” – of working in the field of trauma is witnessing people fight back from cruel circumstance, working with people “who are incredibly brave, incredibly resilient, incredibly positively focused about what they’re doing”.
But there’s none of that in offshore detention. You don’t see the positive glimpses, you don’t see the strength of resilience, you don’t see the quirky little things that people do when the chips are down, you don’t see the laughter and you don’t see the bravery, and you don’t see any of those things that give hope for improvement in the lives of these people.
Every day is demoralising. Every single day and every night. And you can work an eight-hour shift, or a 16-hour-shift, or a 20-hour-shift, you can get up in the middle of the night to answer the calls to go down to the camp, and you know it’s not getting any better. And it’s that demoralisation that is the paramount feature of offshore detention. It’s indeterminate, it’s under terrible, terrible conditions, and there is nothing you can say about it that says there’s some positive humanity in this. And that’s why it’s such an atrocity.
The litany
The official Wilson Security “incident reports” from Stevenson’s time offshore, seen by the Guardian, are testaments to suffering.
More than 2,000 pages, they are awful and they are endless. The reports are brief descriptions of anything that happens in detention on the islands: any disturbance, no matter how small, is “written up”, classified and categorised, fed into the massive bureaucracy that maintains the island regimes.
But the language of the reports is cold and impersonal, a numbing litany of repeated acts of self-harm, of pointless fights and meaningless feuds, of abuse and misery and privation. The black letters carry a texture of depression.
The scale of distress blurs one report into another but, even amid the grim repetition, some stand out.
During Stevenson’s time on Australia’s offshore islands:
- Six boys, held on Nauru without parents, tried to kill themselves en masse, using the same razor blade.
- One woman attempted to kill herself seven times in five weeks, threatened to kill her own daughter, and had to be sedated to stop her repeatedly bashing her head into the ground.
- A woman, held on Nauru with her son, but facing permanent separation from her husband in Australia, carved his name into her chest with a razor because it “releases the feelings in my heart and I feel better”.
- An asylum seeker carved open his own stomach in protest at not being allowed to see or speak with his cousin, who was standing on a roof, threatening to jump.
- A three-year-old boy was allegedly molested by a guard but his mother was too scared of reprisals to report it until months later, when she was medevacked to Australia for a medical emergency.
- A refugee found naked and distressed – and who told authorities she had been sexually assaulted – was taken to the police station instead of the hospital. It was more than five hours after she went missing that she finally saw a doctor.
READ MORE HERE:
Categories: Australia, Europe and Australia, The Muslim Times