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Australian Refugees Policies And Refugees Literature Review

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Australia’s Refugee Policies and Their Health Impact: A Literature Review
Word Count: 1650
Background
Every year, Australia receives approximately 70 000 applications for humanitarian visas (1). Those who apply have often experienced persecution and discrimination in their home countries. The government’s policies to address these applications have remained controversial for decades due to claims that they violate Australia’s human rights’ obligations. These policies have undergone frequent revisions from year to year, each sparking fierce public debate. A significant focus of this discourse has been the impact of these policies on the health of asylum seekers and refugees. In 2009, Johnston (2) conducted a review of empirical research examining …show more content…

The search terms used were 'asylum seeker or refugee or "humanitarian entrant" or "humanitarian visa", ‘health* or illness or disorder’, and ‘polic* or law or legislation’ restricting scans to the title, abstract and keywords of an article. The search was additionally restricted to a publication date after 2004 and Australia as the affiliation country. These criteria generated 51 documents. An additional search term “systematic review” then identified 15 articles in which such a review had been undertaken. The abstracts of these articles revealed that most authors focussed on specific policies or health effects, with only one Australian article, published in 2009, taking a broader outlook (2). To take into consideration recent changes to Australian policies, the original search was then restricted to articles from 2009 to present. This produced 39 documents which were then scanned for relevance to the research question. An additional two articles were identified by searching the reference lists of scanned …show more content…

The recent report by the Human Rights Commission (18) presented strong evidence of the poor health of children in detention. Surveying 11 centres in mainland Australia and Christmas Island, they found that the average time children spent in detention was 8 months. Thirty-four percent of children in detention suffered from mental health disorders and 85% said their emotional and mental health have been affected. Furthermore, children in detention were exposed to dangerous conditions with hundreds of cases of assault and self-harm reported in the 15 months of research. These reports are consistent with a review published in 2012 (19) which described the prevalence of psychiatric disorders, self-harm and a widespread sense of futility among children. While most of this is descriptive data, it reveals that detention conditions are not supportive, and probably destructive, to paediatric

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