Guardian Australia has obtained, from a number of sources, minutes of welfare meetings and a Transfield intelligence report, which detail some of the child protection and abuse concerns in Nauru camps.
Those documents show, in the week beginning 2 June:
- A 17-year-old boy who attempted suicide with a razor after being told he was not allowed access to the internet.
- A 16-year-old girl who told her case workers she had been tormented and sexually harassed by detention centre security guards. The girl reported a number of male Nauruan employees “have tried to hug her, kiss her, told her they would marry her and asked her to have a ‘sexy party’”.
- A 17-year-old boy who attempted suicide by strangling himself.
- A nine-year-old boy from a war-torn country who had begun bed-wetting, and pulling clumps of hair from his head. His mother talked openly about suicide, and “states that she wishes to be dead and would gladly kill herself, however this is a sin and she will be punished so will not do this”. The boy’s mother had discussed being returned to her country of origin because she “knows this will result in her being killed”.
- An eight-year-old boy regularly in fights with other children, and who staff struggled to deal with because there was no interpreter who spoke his family’s language.
- A 13-year-old boy who had only irregular access to his sleep medication, and who was uncontrollably manic at school after not sleeping for 24 hours. His mother was missing.
- A 15-year-old boy who was not eating, and was “displaying signs of depression” after his father was taken to Brisbane in a medical emergency.
In the report for the week ending 13 April, reports raised concerns about:
- An eight-year-old boy who bullied and fought with other children and had attacked teachers, but who cried under a blanket each night, hiding his distress from his parents.
- Several children, the youngest aged four year, who had had both parents arrested for taking part in protests, and were left with no family to care for them.
- An eight-year-old girl and her 10-year-old brother who were attacked by other detainees because their father was accused of assaulting another detainee.
- A 10-year-old boy who had to be physically restrained from attacking other children and had been banned from school because of the threat he posed to other students.
Guardian Australia has also obtained a copy of a Transfield Services intelligence report for Saturday 2 August. It shows:
- Eight detainees were required to be under constant ‘line of sight’ monitoring, four for acts of self-harm.
- One man, who had “self-harmed by banging head” was not permitted to be more than arm’s length from a guard at any time.
- Three women were deemed high security risks because of attempts and threats of self-harm, and aggression towards staff.
- Other detainees were on half-hourly monitoring, others on three-hourly, also because they had committed acts of self-harm, or were deemed “vulnerable”.
- Guards were instructed to monitor detainees’ moods and whether people were refusing food and water.