Australia is `shocked’ by its routine torture of children

July 3, 2014 by 13 Comments

Australia routinely throws asylum seekers into prisons, mostly in remote areas or, even better, on islands. Among `detained’ asylum seekers, children represent the greatest percentage of self-harm and suicidal behavior, according to Gillian Triggs, President of Australia’s Human Rights Commission. According to Triggs, between January 2013 and March 2014, there were 128 reported self-harm incidents by children in detention. Triggs characterized these numbers as “shockingly high.”

The numbers are high. The stories are heartbreaking. The pictures drawn by children are devastating. One girl draws her own portrait. It’s a close up of her face, pressed against bars. Her eyes are blue, her tears, streaming down her face, are blood red. All the self-portraits are similar: the children are crying and are all in cages. Doctors and others report that children can’t sleep, suffer trauma, regress, suffer clinical depression, self-harm, and die inside.

There is no shock here. This has been Australia’s public policy for over a decade, and the policy has only worsened. As Gillian Triggs noted, “Children are being held for significantly greater periods of time than has been the case in the past, and that leads virtually inevitably to greater levels of mental health disturbance.”

Leads virtually inevitably to greater levels of mental health disturbance. Just call it ordinary torture, and be done. The delivery of medical services is worse than toxic, and the stays get longer and longer. Today, Australia holds more or less 1,000 children in “closed immigration detention.”  The longer children stay in “closed immigration detention”, the more likely they are to suffer mental health crises and the more severe those crises will become.

At a hearing of the Australian Human Rights Commission this week, Triggs asked, “Is it acceptable to have children held on Christmas Island in shipping bunkers, containers, on stony ground, surrounded by phosphate dust in that heat?” The government representative replied, “The last time I looked, president, there was no shipping container. They are containerised accommodation, they are not shipping containers.” Unfortunately, “containerised accommodation” does clarify everything. The State sees these children as less than less than less than human.

A child will die in one of those cages, and that child will have been a human. Perception matters, as Australia’s women asylum seekers and their children well know. Torture matters. The torture of children matters. Children matter. Tell Australia, and tell all the nations of the world that throwing asylum seeking children into cages. Children matter. It’s not shocking.

 

(Image Credit: The Daily Mail)

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End juvenile life without parole now!

June 30, 2014 by 8 Comments


The United States is the only country in the world that sentences children to life without parole. In `America’, when we say life without parole, we mean it. Currently, about 2570 children are serving life without parole. With more than 500 people convicted as juveniles and given mandatory life sentences without parole, Pennsylvania leads the nation and the world in the practice of devastating children’s lives.

Two years ago almost to the day, in Miller v Alabama, the United States Supreme Court outlawed mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles. The Court did not ban life sentences without parole, but rather chose to ban the mandatory aspect. Three weeks ago to the day, that same Supreme Court refused to hear a case, Cunningham v Pennsylvania, which concerned the retroactivity of their earlier decision. If mandatory juvenile life without parole became wrong, on Constitutional grounds, in June 2012, shouldn’t that Constitutional reasoning apply to all those children who came before and now struggle to survive in an inhumane situation? For the Supreme Court, the time is not right.

The time is not right for many states across the United States. Last week, the Sentencing Project released a report, Slow To Act: State Responses to 2012 Supreme Court Mandate On Life Without Parole, which showed a national reluctance to abide by the Supreme Court mandate. The Supreme Court decision struck down laws in 28 states: “Two years later, the legislative responses to come into compliance with Miller have been decidedly mixed. A majority of the 28 states have not passed legislation. Frequently, the new laws have left those currently serving life without parole without recourse to a new sentence. Though 13 of the 28 states have passed compliance laws since Miller; the minimum time that must be served before parole review is still substantial, ranging from 25 years (Delaware, North Carolina, and Washington) to 40 years (Nebraska and Texas). Most states, not only those affected by Miller, still allow juveniles to be sentenced to life without a chance of parole as long as the sentence is imposed through individual review rather than as a result of a mandatory statute.”

State after States continues to insist that prison is the answer, that a policy of mass despair and death-in-life is the best thing for `some children.’ Juvenile life without parole laws supposedly addressed a sudden eruption of predatory and feral violence committed by incorrigible children. As Deborah LaBelle, Executive Director of the Juvenile Life Without Parole Initiative, has noted, that means Black and Latino.

In Miller v Alabama, the Supreme Court decided that children are children and that children matter. No matter what they do, children are children, and this means, among things, they have a greater capacity for rehabilitation, assuming responsibility, healing and repairing. Mandatory juvenile life without parole denies children their identities as children. All juvenile life without parole denies children not only their existence as children, but also the possibility for all of us that a community cannot be built on the manufacture of despair. Hope matters.

Pennsylvania, despite your legislature and your Supreme Court, take your position as the world’s leading incarcerator of children for life without parole, and turn it inside out. End juvenile life without parole, all juvenile life without parole. Do it now.

(Image Credit: Pennsylvania Coalition for the Fair Sentencing of Youth)

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Who buries children in septic tanks and unmarked graves?

June 4, 2014 by 72 Comments

Artifacts left over from the Hiawatha Insane Asylum for Indians in Canton, now at the Canton Public Library.

In Tuam, in Galway, Ireland, the Bon Secours sisters ran a place for “fallen women”, from 1925 to 1961. People called it The Home. In Canton, South Dakota, in the United States, the federal government ran the only `asylum’ for Native Americans, from the dawn of 1903 to Christmas 1933, the Hiawatha Asylum for Insane Indians. The home and the asylum form parts of a shared history.

Thanks to the work of historian Catherine Corless, the world “learned” last week that close to 800 infants and children born in the Home were disposed of in a septic tank. These were children of single women. The women came and quickly left, moving to other parts of Ireland or beyond. The children stayed, to be persecuted in school and worse. They suffered extraordinarily high mortality rates. And then they were dumped in a septic tank.

While shock and dismay have been expressed, all of this happened in plain sight. Neighbors complained about the Home. Not so much about the abuse and disappearance of children, but about the stench emanating from the cesspool behind it. Thirty-five years is a long time in a small village to keep a large secret. There was no secret.

Canton presents a similar story. In the late 1890s, a senator from South Dakota began lobbying for an asylum for Indians because, he claimed, “insanity was on the rise among Indians.” Despite overwhelming opposition from the medical community, who found no evidence of high levels of mental illness among Aboriginal populations, the project went through, and, of course, ended up in the southwest corner of the senator’s state.

The vast majority of `residents’ of the Canton Asylum were in for resistance of one form or another. Canton residents and the few survivors of the asylum all agree that there were very few residents who manifested actual mental illness. If a Native American said no to a White person or to an agency or pretty much to anyone, it often meant going to Canton, where most died. Not surprisingly, given that for the first eight years, it had no psychiatrist on staff and for the first 25 of its 31-year history, it had no nurses. The Hiawatha Asylum was a death sentence.

Those who died were buried in an unmarked grave that now sits between the fourth and fifth fairway of the Hiawatha Golf Course. For the past few years, every year the Keepers of the Canton Native Asylum Story have come to perform a healing ritual. They also want the gravesite to be honored. They talk of not only honoring the dead but also of engaging in restorative justice.

From Tuam to Canton, people are engaging in restoration and in restorative justice. This means turning the camera away from the ones thrown into the earth like so much trash and focusing on those who threw those bodies into ground. Who throws dead children into septic tanks? Who throws Indigenous infants, children, men, and women into an unmarked grave? Who? Everyone. This is the process of `nation building’, and it’s a filthy process in which some bodies have value and others have less than none, are deemed problems and obstacles to progress and end up in trash heaps, septic tanks, unmarked graves. There was and there is no secret here.

Tuam

 

(Photo Credit 1: Elisha Page / Argus Leader) (Photo Credit 2: CNN)

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You (children) know too much

January 26, 2014 by 2 Comments

You (children) know too much

You children know too much
observes a grizzly-haired fellow
(his face on quite straight)
to the little ones with him
out in the village’s shop

(soon as you’re born
they make you feel small)

We heard that during apartheid
edicts issued from the mouths
of the guardians of our moralities
(girls wear pink boys)

(chop off their heads
chop off their thoughts
chop off their points
of view)

After all children
should be just
seen and not heard
never mind heeded

(are there young ones
at the Davos talk-shop
or any alternative)

You children know too much
no doubt you need to be
protected from us
who are far behind (still)

(speak when spoken at
we virtuously holler at them
second-hand smoke at our fingertips)

You children know too much
thinking sharp thoughts
getting all erudite
ready to vote one day

(or even to be elected
to rule from a yonder fortress)

You children know

Never a dull moment, Saturday morn, January 25 2014, out in the estate of Belthorn.

(Photo Credit: EventyEirin)

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Cry, cry, cry, set the women prisoners free

January 2, 2013 by 1 Comment

For the New Year, Zambia’s President Michael Sata released 59 women from prison. Of the 59 women, 43 are “inmates with children”, four are pregnant, and 12 are over 60 years old. As a consequence of President Sata’s move, 50 children, who were living in prison with their mothers, will see something like the light of day. The Zambian Human Rights Commission is pleased, as is Zambia’s Non-Governmental Organisation Coordinating Council. Both remind the President, as well, that now the State must attend to the “empowerment” of the 59 women. That includes economic, political, emotional, physical and spiritual well being.

In Uganda, members of civil society are calling on the State to “exempt women offenders with babies and expectant mothers, from long custodial sentences”. 161 children of women prisoners are currently guests of the Ugandan State. 43 of them are in Luzira Women’s Prison, aka Uganda’s Guantánamo. In March 2012, Luzira Women’s Prison at 357 percent capacity, and it’s only gotten worse since.

The situation for U.S. children of the incarcerated is equally horrible. In the U.S. the children don’t get sent to prison with their mothers. Instead, they are sent to “kiddie jail” … or they are left to fend for themselves at home, especially if the at-home parent is a single person, and more often than not in that case, a single mom. One study has shown that only a third of patrol officers modify their behavior or actions if a child is present. Of that third, 20% will treat the suspect differently if children are present, and only 10% will take special care to protect the children. That’s 10% of 30%. That’s 3%, in a country in which imprisonment is a national binge, and in which women are the fastest growing prison population.

And that “special care” can mean something like this: If an adult caregiver is arrested and there are no other adults around to care for a child, the child is taken first to the hospital, then to juvenile detention for processing, and then dropped off at a foster home. It’s a recipe for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The vast majority of incarcerated mothers lived with their children before going to prison. Almost half of incarcerated mothers are single heads of households. Most of their kids end up going to stay with grandparents. For those women prisoners who give birth to children while in prison, more often than not the children are immediately taken away, often forever.

And for women of color, and the children of women of color, it’s worse. For example, some judges give mothers longer sentences because “these women should have considered the impact on their children before committing a crime.” Women of color “bear the brunt” of that largesse.

Since 1991, the number of children under age 18 with a mother in prison more than doubled. In 2007, 1 in 15 Black children, 1 in 42 Latina/Latino children, and 1 in 111 White children had a parent in prison in 2007. Those are the ratios of racial justice and concern for children in the United States.

Make 2013 the year of the child. Set the women prisoners free, and, in so doing, set the children free.

 

(Video Credit: YouTube)

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The ordinary torture of children

December 31, 2012 by 4 Comments

2012 has been a year of spectacular violence – Marikana, Newtown, Delhi, Dhaka – against women, against children, against workers. And that’s only the last five months. There was cause as well to celebrate, to hope, as the Idle No More movement across Canada extends the light of indignation, occupation, Spring into the new year.

And there was the absolutely ordinary violence against children that continued, largely unmarked, except of course by those immediately affected and by the usual suspects of social justice advocates and activists. Especially in the United States and Australia, children continue to spend long times in prison. This includes children asylum seekers.

In a sense, 2012 began with Jakadrien Turner, a fourteen-year-old African American, US citizen, girl who was shipped off to Colombia, alone. Turner spoke no Spanish, knew no one in the country. At the beginning of the year, she was returned to the United States. No apologies. No explanations. Silence.

Displaced and refugee children who move to high-income countries face numerous mental health and other risks, not the least of which are the delicacies of class warfare taking place across the austerity-soaked `free world.’ But they also face a risk mental health studies don’t acknowledge: a war on children.

In the United States, for example, an applicant for asylum faces a double test: evidence of an objective risk of persecution and evidence that they subjectively fear this risk. Recently, Burhan Amare, a nine-year old hearing impaired girl from Ethiopia, was denied asylum. There was clear evidence of real risk of persecution and violence. But the child, communicating through a sign-language interpreter, didn’t sufficiently manifest subjective apprehension.

Burhan Amare has a brother, in Australia. Not a biological brother, but a brother nevertheless. The boy, nine years old, is an asylum seeker in detention. Australia has mandatory detention for refugees and asylum seekers. The boy tried to commit suicide. Supporters are “distressed”. The State is maybe taking the case “under advisement”.

There is a sickness in the system of long-term immigration detention … and the sickness is the world that produces that machinery and then walks away from the slow torture of children in prisons. That is our world, a world in which, daily, children are subjected to long-term detention, for the crime of having nowhere to go. This is the silence and the muffled noises we hear, or don’t, that are the foundation of the explosions of spectacular violence. We must mark the everyday so that we understand the seemingly exceptional explosions are not exceptional. They are part of the fabric of everyday violence. The war on children must end … now.

 

(Photo Credit: Mike Fuentes/Ap)

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The children just can’t stop crying

November 11, 2011 by 2 Comments

Makenda Kambana – Jimmy Mubenga’s wife – (left) with family and supporters

Today, November 10, 2011, Angola marked its 36th Independence Day. How does Europe mark Angola’s independence?

Jimmy Mubenga was on a `hit list’ in Angola, and so he fled to England. He applied for asylum. Denied asylum, he was put on a plane. His wife and five children remained in England. Mubenga resisted deportation. He was forcibly placed on a plane and, according to witnesses, killed by G4S escorts. His widow, Makenda Kambana, reported, “The children just can’t stop crying and I don’t know what to say to them.” That was then. A year later, Makenda Kambana reports that little has changed, except, perhaps, for her education. Now she knows that her husband was not an anomaly, that he was part of a culture of mistreatment and abuse of people of color by the so-called escorts. What does she say to her children now?

That was 2010.

Five years earlier, Manuel Bravo, suffered a related fate. Bravo had arrived in England, with his wife Lidia and two sons, in 2001. He had been imprisoned for pro-democracy activities, and his parents and sister had been killed. In 2004, his wife took their son, Nelio, and returned to Angola, to take care of ailing relatives. She was arrested, and, upon release, fled to Namibia. Manuel Bravo was denied asylum, and then, in the middle of the night, border agents came to the house, took him and his son, Antonio, to the notorious, privately run Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, and told them to prepare for deportation the next day. That night, Manuel Bravo hanged himself, leaving a note that read, in part, “I kill my self, because I don’t have life for live any more. My son Antonio stay here in UK to continue his studying. When he grow up, he [illegible] your decision. I really sorry because I can’t return to Angola.”

Antonio did in fact stay in England. He did pursue his studies. He grew up to be a fine young man. And his reward, now that he’s an adult? The government seeks to deport him. Happy birthday, Antonio, welcome to adulthood.

And then there’s Amalia and Tucha. Amalia is 17; Tucha is 19. Their father was killed, for political activities. Tucha was raped. In 2005, alone and unaccompanied, they fled Angola. Last year, after living in the Netherlands for five years, they were denied asylum and peremptorily shipped back to Angola. No matter that Amalia was a minor. No matter that no one can locate their relatives.

Amalia explains, “A group of policemen entered our bedroom in the middle of the night. They said: ‘Pack your stuff.’ I said: ‘Why, why, why? I’m not yet 18!’ But they grabbed us and put us on a plane. Five people accompanied us; I don’t know who they were. I just cried and cried.”

I just cried and cried.

This is the narrative of empire: The children just can’t stop crying.

 

(Photo Credit: Socialist Worker)

 

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Alabama’s shame is the United States’ shame

October 12, 2011 by 1 Comment

Last week, five women from Bessemer and Birmingham met outside the Hugo L. Black U.S. District Courthouse in downtown Birmingham. They look like a pretty diverse handful of women. They stood there, alone, with their children and their placards, and explained that they are all U.S. citizens, that their children are U.S. citizens, and that their partners are undocumented residents. They appealed to the better conscience and the better consciousness, not to mention the common sense, of the State and of the Court to overturn HB56. They explained that without their partners’ income, they would face desperate times: “If you don’t want to pay for our kids, repeal HB56.”

Quite a few women in Alabama are expressing similar concerns. Lana and Jamie Boatwright run a tomato farm on Chandler Mountain, in Alabama. The tomatoes are ready for picking, but the workers have fled, mostly to Florida where the fieldwork is better and, thus far, the laws are less hostile.

And it’s not just farmers who are suffering, already, from the culture of the law. Contractors, already squeezed by a deep and long recession, now can’t find workers. Teachers, school nurses and school systems report that the children are beginning to disappear. Foley Elementary School, with a 20% Latina/o population, already reports absences, withdrawals, and, even more, a climate of fear, sorrow, pain and suffering, trauma. Those are children. Not that it should matter but it needs to be said, those are children who are mostly U.S. citizens. What is the name for that curriculum, the one these children experience and study?

And the mothers are gathering and organizing, as they do. Mothers who are undocumented residents, like Trini, Erica Suarez, and so many others, are organizing power of attorney for their kids, should “the worst” occur. Mothers with proper papers or with citizenship, women like Rosa Toussaint Ortiz, are agreeing to take care of the children, should “the worst” occur. And activists, women like Monica Hernandez and Helen Rivas, promise to continue to take care of the women, men, children, not to forget, to continue the struggle.

The situation is shameful.

Alabama’s shame is the United States’ shame, and it has a familiar ring to it. What is the name of the shameful system that is emerging in Alabama? First, terrorize a racially or ethnically identified minority population. The terror did not begin with the passage of the law. The terror began with the first mention of its possibility. Then criminalize that population. Then put the “newly minted” criminals in prisons, and if those prisons could be private, as they will be in Alabama, all the better. Then, and here’s the kicker, when businesses, and in particular when farmers and contractors “discover” that the labor well has gone dry, provide them with prisoners, at rock bottom prices, of course. That’s what John McMillan, commissioner of the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries, suggested. The State is looking into short- and long-term solutions to the labor problem and is feeling “optimistic.”

Optimistic?

What is the name of that system of shame that Alabama is dutifully re-enacting? Some call it slavery, and perhaps they’re right. What would you call that shame, that shameful system, which haunts the United States?

 

(Photo Credit: al.com)

 

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Australia vows to turn Black children into specters

June 5, 2011 by Leave a Comment

 


Australia’s Immigration Minister has vowed to ship off asylum seekers, including unaccompanied children, to Malaysia. This was meant to be Australia’s “solution” to a “crisis” of asylum seekers. Simple detention simply wasn’t enough. The State announced its intention late this week, and now seems somewhat surprised at the outcry. The government never thought that the fate of children of color, call them Black children, could matter quite so much.

This aspirational project of turning children of color, Black children, into distant and dimly remembered specters comes at a poignantly timely moment.

Today, June 5, 2011, is the last day of “Glenn Ligon: America”, a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Ligon is famous for works that turn words into paintings, stencils that conjure histories of slavery, of racism, of homophobia, of violence. Some of these pieces have been described as “stenciled sentences pulled from different sources.” The sentences aren’t pulled nor are they transcribed.

They are, instead, translations, as they are invocations.

Consider, for example, “Untitled (I’m Turning Into a Specter before Your Very Eyes and I’m Going to Haunt You)”. This has been described as having been pulled from a play by Jean Genet, The Blacks: A Clown Show.

But the line in Genet’s play is actually, “You’re becoming a specter before their very eyes and you’re going to haunt them.”

And it has a particular New York history.

On May 4th, 1961, almost fifty years ago to the day, Jean Genet’s The Blacks: A Clown Show opened in New York, at the St. Marks Playhouse, and it was immediately hailed as a transformative event. When it opened, the play, a meditation on Blackness, Black rage and Black liberation, was described as “brilliantly sardonic”, “a lyrical tone poem”, a play of “furies”

The original cast included Roscoe Lee Browne, James Earl Jones, Louis Gossett, Jr., Ethel Ayler, Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou, and Charles Gordone. The Blacks was the longest running Off-Broadway non-musical of the entire 1960s.

In an epigraph to the play, Genet claimed “One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what’s his color?”

Fifty years later, we watch the Australian government plan to ship unaccompanied Black children to Malaysia, and we ask, “But what exactly is a Black child? First of all, how old is she?”

The children Australia plans to send to Malaysia are children seeking asylum. Not failed asylum seekers, but rather children in the process of seeking asylum. Australia’s Minister of Immigration believes that turning children into specters will deter “people smugglers”.

Today it was announced that the “deal” is being altered. Girl refugees might not be sent to Malaysia. The girls “spared” from deportation will still be unaccompanied and still be behind bars. They will not thank the State for this “gift”, no more than the boys will. These children designated as specters-to-come will haunt the State for decades. Fifty years ago, the specters will haunt them. Today, the specters will haunt you. Fifty years from now … the specters will haunt … us.

 

(Art Credit: Glenn Ligon / Philadelphia Museum of Art / Washington Post)

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Florida has a drug problem

May 30, 2011 by Leave a Comment

The State of Florida, the so-called Sunshine State, has a drug problem, a drug crisis actually. The State seems hooked on psychotropic drugs for children. And not just any children. The most vulnerable children. Foster children. Children in prison. Children in various forms and modes of `custody’.

Two years ago, on April 16, 2009, Gabriel Myers, a seven-year-old child, hanged himself. Gabriel was in foster care. At the time of his death, Gabriel was prescribed psychotropic medications. The State of Florida Department of Children and Families appointed a work group, the Gabriel Myers Work Group, to look into both the circumstances of Gabriel’s death, and life, and that of all children in State foster care.

Gabriel was placed in foster care in order to take him out of a traumatically abusive household. He was “brought into care June 29, 2008.” Ten months later, he was dead. It happens that quickly, and it happened that torturously slowly as well. Gabriel saw psychiatrists and therapists. He was described as “overwhelmed with change and possibly re-experiencing trauma.” He engaged in self-destructive behavior.

The Work Group found that, while there were many caring adults around Gabriel, in the end he was “no one’s child.” No one adult took full responsibility, and so there was no one to notice or address failures, gaps, and lapses in treatment. For example, there was no one to ask hard, even belligerent, questions about the effects and impact of psychotropic drugs on a child. According to the Work Group, there was no sense of urgency: “Because the perception of time for a child is compressed, a demonstrated sense of urgency by adults is vital.”

The Work Group found that, while nationally 5% of all children receive psychotropic medication, among Florida’s foster kids, the rate was 15.2%. Florida has all sorts of protocols and regulations, but if there’s no one, no adult, with a vital and demonstrated sense of urgency, the drugs flow. Gabriel’s tragedy was one of repeatedly missed opportunities for real treatment, for real help, for real care. That was the Report of the Gabriel Myers Work Group, November 19, 2009.

That was two years ago. And today?

Today, Florida distributes psychotropic drugs, with what amounts to abandon, to children in prison. Doctors are prescribing psychotropic drugs more often than ibuprofen. In 2007, according to a report last week, the Department of Juvenile Justice bought more than twice as much Seroquel as ibuprofen for its state-operated jails and homes for children.

Again, there’s little or no oversight. By its own admission, the State doesn’t know where most of the drugs are. This is called a “functionality” concern. There’s little or no oversight, as well, concerning conflict of interest between prescribing doctors and the pharmaceutical corporations.

What’s going on in Florida? According to Broward County Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, whose office represents children in juvenile court, it’s battery: “If kids are being given these drugs without proper diagnosis, and it is being used as a ‘chemical restraint,’ I would characterize it as a crime. A battery – a battery of the brain each and every time it is given.”

According to Dr. Glenn Currier, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester in New York, the doses are extraordinarily high. When asked about a case involving one young female prisoner, Dr. Currier remarked: “I have heard of doses that high in large adult males. But not in girls.”

Florida used to put juveniles in prison for life, without any chance of parole, for non-homicide offenses. Last year, in Graham v Florida, the US Supreme Court ruled that it could no longer do so. In the 1990s, Florida sent 7000 children to adult courts. That’s more than the rest of the country, combined.

What’s going on in Florida is a crisis, a crisis of care, a crisis of urgency. The State is distributing deadly drugs to its most vulnerable children. And that’s a crime.

 

(Image credit: CCHR International)

 

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