BY PAMELA CURR
This could also be titled "What every man woman and child can be subjected to in the detention camps under the migration act". Read it, and then ask yourself how you would feel if, in order to visit a friend in another detention centre compound, you had to submit to it.
I tried to ask myself the next question, but, as a parent of a 13 and 16-year-old, I can't actually bear to think of watching this being done to children. Under the migration act, any child over 10 years can be strip-searched.
Australasian Correctional Management guards use the right-to-inspect provisions liberally: opening doors, shining torches in faces and demanding identity cards all through the night at hourly, even half-hourly, intervals when they feel like it. So it is not hard to imagine that this strip searching will be conducted with a maximum of menace and enjoyment from the guards. Strip searching is being done routinely in Baxter. To make a phone call in Baxter, people have to go outside their compound. this requires a strip search to re-enter.
This is how strip searches take place:
Persons are required to remove all clothing one article at a time and hand it to one of the two officers doing the search.
The officers, wearing rubber gloves, physically search all clothing and throw or drop it to the floor after searching. The person stands in various stages of undress, holding the next item of clothing, until the officer has finished with each item of clothing.
The process of removing the clothes and having them searched leaves the person standing naked before staff and possibly other persons for some minutes. Once naked, the person is then ordered to:
Bend head forward and run fingers though hair; open mouth (the mouth cavity inspection); remove any dentures used; pull down bottom lip; pull up top lip; lift and wiggle tongue; turn head to the right and pull back ear; turn head to the left and pull back ear; turn head to the right (to allow the officers to look in ear canal); turn head to the left (to allow the officers to look in ear canal); hold both arms out and show the officers the front and back of hands, between fingers and under arms; lift scrotum (it is possible to be required to peel back foreskin if so ordered); turn around and bend over and pull the cheeks of buttocks apart, displaying the space between the cheeks (the buttocks cavity inspection); lift right foot and wiggle toes; lift left foot and wiggle toes; and get dressed.
(It is part of the procedure that the person is told to "get dressed" — it is the last little insult to demonstrate just how powerless you are — that they even instruct you to put on clothing).
[Pamela Curr is the Greens Victoria's refugees' rights spokesperson.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 16, 2003.
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