Linda Briskman

Returning to History: The Ethics of Researching Asylum Seeker Health in Australia

Australias policy of mandatory indefinite detention of those seeking asylum and arriving without valid documents has led to terrible human rights abuses and cumulative deterioration in health for those incarcerated. We argue that there is an imperative to research and document the plight of those who have suffered at the hands of the Australian government and its agents. However, the normal tools available to those engaged in health research may further erode the rights and well being of this population, requiring a rethink of existing research ethics paradigms to approaches that foster advocacy research and drawing on the voices of those directly affected, including those bestowed with duty of care for this population.

Researching the Margins: Strategies for Ethical and Rigorous Research with Marginalised Communities

A plethora of research textbooks attuned to social work and the human services are readily available, and it is inevitably complicated for practitioner researchers to select those that will be the most useful in their endeavours. For educators the same quandary exists for not only do they need to inform students about paradigms and methods but are also required to inspire students to be passionate about research in their later practice and to ensure that they are critical and reflective in this quest. Researching the Margins is not targeted at social workers specifically but geared to a wider social research audience of which social workers are a part. The examples provided in the case study chapters will all resonate with social workers employed in the areas covered; these include the realms of drug use, intellectual disability, young people, older people and HIV positive populations. A sound basic text is an essential tool in order that students and practitioners understand basic research tenets. Beyond research rigour, there is an imperative for both groups to be alert to ethical matters, both general to all and specific to their fields of practice. Social work practitioners may extend their practice with vulnerable groups into research and there are some thorny issues that need to be to the forefront. In order to be a truly ethical social researcher it is necessary to engage in reflective practice beyond organisational and ethics committee strictures. This book is useful in this journey. It is not a ‘‘how to’’ text but is rather positioned as a book about how to be a researcher with marginalised communities. However, in providing examples of both methods and research specificities it does deviate at times into prescription, which some readers may find useful. Through engaging writing and discussion mode, the book highlights questions that emergent and even experienced researchers must consider before embarking on research. In this sense research is a mere extension of good practice where the same considerations apply in ensuring that there are beneficial outcomes and minimal harms. The term ‘‘margins’’ and ‘‘marginalised’’ are contested and value-laden concepts and the authors explain the tension effectively through the examples provided and in relation to questions of power that determine the labelling of ‘‘the margin’’. An important point here and one to which I am drawn is not to adopt the terms uncritically but to incorporate a political analysis, a facet where I would like to have seen an extended discussion. One important question raised is what about what happens when issues arising from research are drawn to the attention of the state. One recent example, although too late for incorporation in this text, is the 2007 federal government intervention into the Northern Territory where the government misused research to provide a rationale for its actions. The reader can analyse this and other areas of interest through the position advocated in the book. One of the major strengths of the book is the use of exemplars to illustrate the ethical and practical issues, with a reflexive approach incorporated, something that the social work practitioner can mirror in their own research. Although this book is Australia focused in most of its case studies, there will be universal appeal. The case studies themselves illuminate the issues raised in the introductory section through the sharing of the research journeys of the different authors that are revisited and analysed in the final chapter of the book, ‘‘Who’s on whose margins’’ that explores the key themes. The essence of the book is how to conduct research that is both ethical and rigorous. The notion of ‘‘rigour’’ remains elusive and even disputed in research circles particularly among those who adhere to a hierarchy of

Nursing in asylum seeker detention in Australia: care, rights and witnessing

The system of asylum seeker detention in Australia is one in which those seeking refuge are stripped of many of their rights, including the right to health. This presents serious ethical problems for healthcare providers working within this system. In this article we describe asylum seeker detention and analyse the role of nurses. We discuss how far an “ethics of care” and witnessing the suffering of asylum seekers can serve to improve their situation and improve ethical nursing practice.

Care or Collusion in Asylum Seeker Detention

This paper explores ethical questions arising from the work of health practitioners in immigration detention centres in Australia. It raises questions about the roles of professional disciplines and the ways in which they confront dual loyalty issues. The exploration is guided by interviews conducted with health professionals who have worked in asylum seeker detention and an examination of the outsider advocacy role undertaken by the social work profession. The paper discusses the stance taken by individuals and professional associations on participation in controlled settings, including as participant, bystander and advocate, and asks when the provision of care becomes collusion with oppression.

Challenge and collusion: health professionals and immigration detention in Australia

This article describes the impact of immigration detention on the health of asylum seekers. Drawing on specific examples, it explores the roles of professional staff working within the detention system and/or challenging the practices as advocates. Using oral testimony from a citizen-initiated campaign, The Peoples Inquiry into Detention, we interrogate the harmful experiences of force-feeding, deportation practices and the incarceration of children, including the role of the health professionals who sometimes betrayed their duty of care. Discussed are the paradoxes of dual loyalty and professional ethics.

Psychiatric ethics and a politics of compassion: the case of detained asylum seekers in Australia

Australia has one of the harshest regimes for the processing of asylum seekers, people who have applied for refugee status but are still awaiting an answer. It has received sharp rebuke for its policies from international human rights bodies but continues to exercise its resolve to protect its borders from those seeking protection. One means of doing so is the detention of asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat. Health care providers who care for asylum seekers in these conditions experience a conflict of “dual loyalty,” whereby their role in preserving and maintaining the health of patients can run counter to their employment in detention facilities. Many psychiatrists who have worked in the detention setting engage in forms of political activism in order to change the process of seeking refuge.

Please Knock Before You Enter

It is humbling to review a book that is written from an Aboriginal perspective and which traverses deep personal and cultural experiences and knowledge with academic conventions. This book is illuminating, moving, and thought provoking and makes an important contribution to the literature on research with Indigenous communities. The author, Karen Martin, positions herself from the outset in relation to her People, the Noonuccal People of Quandamoopah of Queensland. An interesting and engaging part of the process of her work is drawing on and honouring the work of well known poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker). Although there is increasing emphasis now on respectful research that stems from a postcolonial analysis, this work is unique in the way it delves into the heart of the concept in explicating ways of doing. To the author’s credit, although her book can be seen as a critique of the way research has been conducted ‘‘on’’ Aboriginal peoples, she is less concerned with blame and criticism and more with explanation and ideas to move forward through the insights that she provides. As with an increasing number of academic commentators, Martin sees research as an instrument of colonialism in the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples. For the reflective non Aboriginal researcher this makes sense, particularly for the social work profession where we are becoming increasingly aware of how institutions have silently colluded in the devaluing of Aboriginal knowledge and the misrepresentation of Aboriginal peoples. Even though research protocols are now firmly in place, there is still the danger of objectifying, misrepresenting, and hurting, and Martin’s book presents a wake-up call to those subscribing to predominantly non Aboriginal and dominant research and theoretical paradigms. The development of Indigenous research paradigms is central to the purposes of Martin’s research and she develops an innovative theoretical framework which she calls ‘‘Relatedness Theory’’ that comprises three conditions: ‘‘Ways of Knowing’’, ‘‘Ways of Being’’, and ‘‘Ways of Doing’’. The concept of Storywork is critical to her data collection as is the notion of research as ceremony, both of which present challenges to the conventions and the terminology of research texts. The author tells us that the regulation of outsiders in the site of her research, the Burungu KukuYalanji community of far North Queensland, is not a new concept developed by academics. Agency has always been exerted in regulating ‘‘Outsiders’’. In developing her theory of relatedness, it becomes apparent that the Outsider can be Aboriginal or non Aboriginal. Outsiders are not automatically excluded but conditions must be met. Like all questions of ethical research, power relations are at the forefront and the more self-reflective a researcher is the more likely he or she will engage in a dialogical approach that is transformative for Aboriginal peoples. From the perspective of an Aboriginal woman and a researcher bound by certain academic conventions this could have been a vexed project. Yet Martin traverses this terrain with rigour taking the Outsider reader along with her. Interestingly, the researcher herself was an Outsider to this group so one of the key research issues for her was how she would behave when visiting their lands. As an Aboriginal woman she is a step ahead as she notes that what is known about Aboriginal regulation of Outsiders has largely been constructed by non Aboriginal scholars. The methodology chapter is illuminating although at times complex to grasp derived from what in an earlier section is defined as Quampie methodology. In essence this methodology, the author explains, is

Moral outrage! Social work and social welfare

As guest editors of this Australasia-Pacific Special Issue, we are inspired by Stephane Hessel’s poignant call in Time for Outrage! (2011), which implores us to shirk complacency and indifference and be moved to react to the unbearable things we see around us. Social work/social welfare practitioners are critically placed to bear witness to these injustices and morally obligated to speak out, act up and resist. Infringements of ethical standards such as fairness and respect, violation of rights, the compromising of trust and deeply held beliefs, evoke profoundly felt emotion which can be channelled towards beneficial change. Practitioners often find themselves in situations that confront their integrity as individuals and professionals, and frequently bear witness to the impacts of inequities and injustices on those with whom they work. The reach of our view and involvement in injustices has expanded, as we are interconnected across the globe in ways never experienced before. At home, our sensibilities are currently being affronted by the spectre of children in offshore detention in Nauru, where documented and witnessed abuses compromise child welfare. As doctors in the Australian Medical Association refuse to comply with government policy in returning vulnerable asylum seeker children to the Nauru detention centre, we in turn question our role as social workers in speaking out and acting in the best interests of these children. And more: in the light of entrenched inequalities for Indigenous peoples in Australia and the lack of progress on key Closing the Gap targets, we cannot but feel the shame. We are outraged but we so easily look away. And looking away from a distance, we view the crisis of humanitarianism troubling Europe as conflicting perspectives surround the unprecedented image of Syrian migrants walking to seek safety. Our perspectives on moral outrage are necessarily shaped by our positioning, social and geographical, by issues of distance and proximity, both literal and constructed. The tyranny of distance is at one and the same time a fact of our geographical positioning but more acutely a reflection of our ability to distance ‘the other’. Connecting with the experience and source of suffering and injustice raises fundamental questions for us about proximity, distance and identifications with ‘others’ at home and away. At the same time, our ambition must be to transcend national boundaries in seeking out social justice. Hessel argues (2011, 35), ‘it is high time that concerns for ethics, justice and sustainability prevail’ and urges us collectively as political actors, intellectuals and citizens to be moved to action. Engaging as it is, Hessel’s polemic raises more questions than it settles for social work and welfare practice and obliges us to ask searching questions such as: Whose outrage? Why? How is it expressed and what type of response should it evoke? This type of

Refugees, Islamophobia, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Challenging Social Work Co-Option

As global discourses on refugees and Muslims become more exclusionary, the ethics and traditions of our profession mean social workers arguably have a particular responsibility to work for transformative change. This column argues that social workers need to be wary of direct complicity with harsh policies through implementation roles and, indirectly, through co-option into dominant discourses about refugees and Islam more generally and Muslim women specifically.

Radical Social Work in Practice: Making a Difference

distillation of interventions described with almost no reference to the research literature. While further reading is suggested in key areas, we have to rely on the authors’ expertise in summarising the research base. So, for example, family therapy is described in one page with only one reference to the literature. We’re left with the worry that the text is ‘‘atheoretical’’ as well as being ‘‘adisciplinary’’. I was disappointed that the book also ignores two major theoretical dimensions central to contemporary mental health policy. There is very little acknowledgement of the principles of evidence-based practice here, and no acknowledgement of the importance of consumer and family participation as an organising principle of service delivery. These are serious weaknesses in a text claiming to be a handbook for practice. In summary, the book has some strengths as a general introduction to practice in the CAMHS area, or for generalist workers in health and human services. It would be useful perhaps for a social work student to read if they want to do a placement in a CAMHS agency. The limitations are too obvious, and few social workers would find this text very useful.