Former Nauru social worker looks at legal action

Transcript

An Australian social worker falsely accused off making up stories about asylum seeker abuse and kicked off Nauru is looking at suing Immigration officials.

Natasha Blucher was ordered off the island in October last year after then-immigration minister Scott Morrison said an intelligence report revealed Save the Children workers had coached detainees to harm themselves and fabricate stories of abuse.

An independent review five months later cleared the workers after finding no evidence.

Ms Blucher has now given evidence at a Canberra senate inquiry into what's been going on at the Nauru detention centre.

Thirty-three asylum seekers say they were raped or sexually assaulted, while a further five claim they've been asked for sexual favours in exchange for contraband.

Ms Blucher, who no longer works for Save the Children, told Mary Wilson being deported in such circumstances was horrific and insulting.

NATASHA BLUCHER: Never at any stage have any of us had any specific allegations made against us, so the only information we have about what we were accused of is the information that was given to the public of Australia on national television. And I think when your reputation has been so horrifically publicly damaged, I would believe that you would have a basic right to respond to that, but in order to respond to it we need to know what it is that we've been specifically been accused of doing.

MARY WILSON: Now that Phillip Moss has essentially cleared you, saying that there's no evidence that you did this, is there any cause for action from that against immigration?

NB: They've appointed an external reviewer I think, an independent reviewer called Mr Christopher Duggan, he has apparently conducted a review of this decision. However, we haven't seen any outcomes, we haven't seen any terms of reference, we haven't been contacted by Mr Duggan, we haven't been contacted by the department. The processes have been stretched out over a period of time and every time we make enquiries or our lawyers make enquiries with the department they seem to come up with some different type of review, and so I guess at this point we're waiting for the outcome of Mr Duggan's review and then we'll consult with our lawyers after that.

MW: Might you take action?

NB: It's possible, but we would have to consult with our lawyers.

MW: On Nauru then, what did you see? What kind of abuse did you witness?

NB: I think one of the most prominent, dehumanising things that I noticed was the pervasive use of boat identification numbers. A lot of service providers directly address people by number....

MW:...the service providers, you're talking about guards?

NB: I'm talking about Wilson Security officers, yes, and often the asylum seekers would say, 'they're treating us as though we're less than human,' and I also think there's a psychological value for people who are performing guarding duties in that they can treat people differently if they refer to them only as numbers and and dehumanise them in their head. I think it probably helps people to sleep at night.

MW: You spoke to a woman though who was very clear about sexual harassment.

NB: Yes, that's correct. There was a particular allegation of sexual harassment that a woman, she had made a complaint and I had been asked to speak to her in relation to that. She said to me that she was too afraid to leave her tent, that she was afraid every time she went to the mess to eat, whenever she essentially tried to get out of her immediate living area she felt scared. And that was because there were a number of particularly Nauruan security officers who she said were hanging around the camp and essentially grooming female asylum seekers for relationships once they got outside of the closed camp and into the Nauruan community, and she said that herself and many of her friends were very scared by this, that they had fears for the other young girls in the camp as well and that this type of grooming behaviour made them almost too afraid to go and live in the community and they felt like they were sort of trapped between a rock and a hard place. It was either remain in the camp with the desire to be free of the camp, but then the only other opportunity was for them to live in the community with these men.

MW: What did grooming mean? What did it involve?

NB: Things like flirtation, really obvious kind of leering at them, saying things like 'oh I can't wait for you to get out of the camp because we can have a relationship then, I can have sex with you.' She felt that the guards were treated the women as though they were a commodity that would be available to them once they were outside.

MW: And do you know if sexual assault is widespread outside the community once these women actually do move in?

NB: I was removed from the island before a lot of that started in earnest but I have seen a lot of reports of sexual assault in the community, yes. And I would probably guess from my experience on Nauru that it's probably a lot more widespread probably because a lot of women would probably be ashamed of it and also because there's so much secrecy in relation to what happens on Nauru that people who work for service providers and others would be too afraid to make that information public.

MW: So how would you describe the atmosphere in these detention camps? What did it seem like to you?

NB: What I saw, and what I will always remember, and a lot of my colleagues will say this as well is just the violent disintegration of peoples mental health. And when I talk about violent deterioration I refer to people collapsing and screaming, people going into states that seemed to me to appear to be psychosis, people with incredibly frequent suicidal ideations, people unable to get out of bed, unable to move. You would walk around the camp and you would see people sitting outside the tents and just staring vacantly into nothing. I don't know what it is that particularly creates deterioration, but I think that it may be a combination of how hot and uncomfortable and horrific the environment is to live in and the incredible amount of power and control that's exerted, you know, really regimented living, no ability to make choices, and then the uncertainty. So not knowing how long it is that you'll be inside that camp. And then also I think, particularly for parents, seeing the deterioration of their children. It drove people mad. The whole camp, to my mind, appeared to be permeated with madness and depression.