“I want my story to be heard”: Detained woman’s chilling words before her death revealed
Content warning: This article includes mentions of suicide and mental health struggles.
A woman who died of a suspected suicide in an Australian immigration detention centre has been identified as a New Zealand mum of two, who had her mental health medication restricted and pleaded with fellow detainees to tell her story just hours before she died.
It is understood the woman was a 53-year-old from Christchurch (Ōtautahi), as reported by TeAoMāori.news.
It has also been reported that the woman’s cell was raided by guards, who removed a stray cat she had adopted during her time at the centre, hours before her death on Saturday.
She had been held at Sydney’s Villawood Immigration Detention Centre for six months under the controversial 501 deportation program - which allows for non-Australian citizens to be subject to deportation if their criminal record includes a prison sentence of 12 months or more.
During the woman’s stay, fellow detainees said her mental state rapidly deteriorated.
“The treatment she received was not human,” a source inside the facility who was familiar with its operations and her situation, told Māori TV.
The source said Serco, the centre’s private operator, is failing to tackle mental illness among detainees.
“With mental health concerns, basically it’s the same approach for everyone. Heavily sedate them so they shut up.”
Ian Rintoul, a member of the advocacy group Refugee Action Coalition, told Māori TV the fellow detainees and the woman herself pleaded with Serco to get her help.
Both she and a few other detainees had told Serco and Border Force (that) she needed help and should not be in detention. Her mental illness was very obvious,” Rintoul said.
Friends of the woman have remembered her as “gorgeous, with a beautiful wairua”, per NZ Herald.
“I was concerned about her, about her mental health, especially in that place,” one said.
The day after her death, detainees told The Guardian that she had been fighting to get access to her mental health medication earlier in the day and that she wanted her story to be told.
“She told me that she needs to have some medication at 8am in the morning but they’d give her medication like at 11am or 11.30am. And that makes her feel bad,” one detainee told the publication.
“She was telling us last night, ‘I want my story herald. I want the people to know what happened to me. I want to tell the people what these detention centres do to people,” another recalled.
One detainee said one of the likely “final straws” was when guards took the cat she adopted, which had been roaming the facility.
“She was pretty obsessive, attached, and they knew that. They broke her spirit,” they said.
Her fellow deportees also said the woman was trying to get in touch with her two sons, one of whom lives in Sydney, but she believed guards were preventing her from doing so.
According to Māori TV, the Australian Border Force took more than 12 hours to get in touch with the woman’s family after she died, while Aotearoa’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade said on Monday night that it hadn’t been notified of a death of a New Zealand woman in an Australian detention centre.
Her death also comes within days of Australia’s change in leadership, wth incoming Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signalling that the 501 program would continue but that there might be more consideration for the time someone has lived in Australia and whether they have ties to New Zealand.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has welcomed potential reforms to the program, which disproportionately affects Māori, and said she will raise the grievances related to the program “no matter whom the leader is in Australia”.
“We accept because we do it too, circumstances under which people will be deported … we have always reserved the right for New Zealand to do that,” Ms Ardern said in her weekly post-Cabinet press conference.
“The area we have had grievance is where individuals are being deported who have little or no connection to New Zealand.
“I will be utterly consistent no matter whom the leader is in Australia with raising that grievance.”
If you are experiencing a personal crisis or thinking about suicide, you can call Lifeline 131 114 or beyondblue 1300 224 636 or visit lifeline.org.nz.
Image: Getty Images