A new report from the Australian Human Rights Commission said it was "very concerned" about the accommodation conditions for women at Villawood Immigration Detention Centre. The commission found women were being housed in a compound sharing a fence with men separated for the "nature of their offending", including sexual offences. The Department of Home Affairs disagreed with a recommendation to relocate the women to a separate, detached village inside Villawood.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00We know that women are approximately 6%
00:05of the total immigration detention population.
00:08And when we inspected facilities in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth
00:12earlier this year, what we found is that there were too many examples
00:16where they're part of a system that is designed
00:19and run predominantly for men,
00:21and so their specific needs and vulnerabilities are unmet.
00:25And this is something that we think really needs to be addressed
00:28because nobody should be an afterthought
00:31simply because they're part of a minority in detention.
00:34One of the things we found is that
00:36because there are limited accommodation options for women,
00:39they're often detained interstate, so away from family and children.
00:44And we also found that there are often inadequate visiting facilities,
00:48which makes it really hard for them to actually be visited by their kids.
00:52We had in the report women telling us that they hadn't been hugged
00:56by their children or family for years,
00:58and that's something that just simply shouldn't be occurring.
01:01There are 31 recommendations that we've made,
01:03and we say all of them need to be implemented.
01:06Now, we've had some really good examples of one thing
01:09that we raised during the inspection about access to canteens
01:12being equitable was fixed before we'd even left the centre,
01:15so that's a great example of how things can change really quickly.
01:19But unfortunately, of the 31 recommendations,
01:22there are only 11 that have been accepted
01:24or partially accepted by the department,
01:26and our view is they all need to be accepted,
01:29they all need to be implemented,
01:31because women shouldn't just be an afterthought,
01:33whether in immigration detention or anywhere else.