YAREN – An Australian teacher has described conditions on Nauru as “cruel” and “inhumane”, raising concerns that children would be traumatised if forced to return to the detention centre.

This week the High Court threw out a challenge to offshore detention, ruling that asylum seekers now in Australia may have to return to Nauru.

Evan Davis was contracted to teach the children of asylum seekers at an Australian-funded school on the island from 2014 until the school was closed in the middle of last year.

“Ever since I came back, and I’ve been back in Australia since July, I don’t think a day goes past where I don’t think about these students,” Davis told the ABC.

“ I also just constantly think about the damage that we’re doing to them by detaining them on the island, and also the damage that we’ll be doing to these people if we return them.

“So I just can’t live with myself with the thought that I’ve witnessed this.

“I’m probably one of the few people that has actually had the privilege of teaching these students and getting to know them and I just think that the Australian public should realise what’s happening to these people.”

Davis said the students he taught on Nauru were some of the best he had come across in his career.

“I mean our attendance rate was excellent, the kids would always be waiting for us at the bus stop in the morning where we picked them up from the camp,” he said.

“I look at those kids and you could see the next generation of doctors and teachers and nurses and any opportunity that they have has been robbed of them.

“So I find it really hard to reconcile that imposing that type of abuse and creating that type of trauma on these students is justified under the fact that it has stopped the boats.”

Davis spoke to the ABC on the day the Australian Human Rights Commission released a report into the condition of children at Wickham Point Detention Centre in Darwin.

The report’s authors found the children, most of whom had spent months in Nauru, were among the most traumatised they had ever seen.

Davis agreed that the detention system on Nauru was inhumane.

“It was quite obvious abuse,” he said. “The kids, towards the end of my tenure there, I found that the kids were becoming very, very depressed.

“I mean, we could still motivate them to do work but essentially once they left school, they went back to camp and they sat around, they said that they were depressed, they quite often talked about thoughts of suicide, of self-harm.”

He said when the school was closed in the middle of last year it was a real blow to the asylum seekers.

“I remember when it was announced that the school was closing, the parents were in absolute tears because they said in their own words, ‘this is the last good thing that we have on this island. This is the only thing that we look forward to, and as a consequence, taking that away from us means that we have nothing now, we have no hope, we have no future, we don’t know what’s happening’.

“I mean, some of these people have been in detention close to two years now. Even if they are released, they’re still stuck on the island, which is only a very, very small island, and there’s nothing for them to do.”

Davis said he felt compelled to speak out, even though he was risking a two-year jail term.

“It’s a cruel. It’s an inhumane way of treating people, and there’s no question about it that these young people, and also the parents as well, are suffering greatly as a result of the policies and the way they’re being treated,” he said.

“And I just think that it’s irresponsible for someone who knows about this not to speak up about it,” Davis said. - ABC