WHEN Chris Cummins tells people she’s spent the last five years as a torture and trauma counsellor working with asylum seekers on Christmas Island, they’re naturally intrigued.

As she says, it’s a natural human response to be interested in stories of human suffering.  

Chris has chosen to speak out about her experiences – not to dwell on the horrors and grief that so many detainees have endured, but instead to “re-humanise the demonised”.

“Asylum seekers are constantly wearing negative labels,” Chris says. “Illegals, queue-jumpers, boat-people – their value as people is diminished.

“The only way we can effect change is to hear their stories.”

Chris’s work as a mental health nurse has taken her to far-flung places, advocating for the most vulnerable. She was a volunteer nurse in Sri Lanka for 12 months, worked with Afghan refugees in Iran, and has spent time in remote Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley.

Chris jumped at the opportunity to work on Christmas Island, though nothing could have prepared her for the depth of suffering or the level of trauma experienced by detainees.

Around the time of her arrival, a boat of Tamil refugees arrived from Sri Lanka, seeking sanctuary from the 30-year civil war. The tragic story of the Kumar family is still hard for Chris to relate, even after five years.

“Joseph and Lavinia were a young couple travelling with their 10 year-old daughter, Sylvia,” Chris recalls.

“In 2009, the Sri Lankan military had attacked their refugee camp repeatedly. 

Caught in the middle of the shelling, the Kumars’ two youngest children, Mary and Michael, were killed.

“Joseph and Lavinia were forced to leave the bodies of their children lying beside countless others, later to be buried in a mass grave.

“The couple both suffered serious injuries themselves and spent six weeks apart at different hospitals. Eventually they were reunited in a camp hospital and were offered assistance by the husband of another patient.”

The Kumars’ story is horrific, though not uncommon.

They were forced into hiding in Colombo, sold all their possessions to buy passports, evaded the Sri Lankan Army and spent six months as refugees in India, before spending 24 days at sea in an attempt to reach Australia – the final three of those without any food or water.

They survived, only to end up at Christmas Island.

“By far the greatest heartbreak for this family was the graphic memory of their children’s bodies left behind,” Chris says. “Joseph and Lavinia’s physical wounds had healed but the sadness was overwhelming.

“As the Kumars were devout Catholics, I arranged a memorial service at the local church, and a second one in the detention centre where many more Tamils could attend.

“They had a photo of Mary and Michael and I copied this onto a memorial card with an appropriate prayer. Each person who attended was given the memorial card as they would have done at home in Sri Lanka.

“For the Kumars it was an opportunity to mourn, to reflect on the great sadness they had endured, and to open a pathway to healing.”

Not long after, the family was transferred to Darwin, but were refused asylum and forcibly deported.

“The Kumars weren’t breaking any laws,” Chris says.

“It wasn’t illegal for them to seek sanctuary – they weren’t jumping a queue. They were just desperate people fleeing terror.”

The Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre was opened in 2008 and originally built to accommodate 400 people.

Chris describes it as “very much like a prison”, with high-level security and CCTV monitoring. Indeed the British company that owns and operates the centre, Serco, operates prisons throughout Europe and Australia.

The centre quickly grew to accommodate 800, then to over 2000 by converting class rooms and visitor areas into dorms. By Chris’s final year on the island it was bursting at the seams with almost 4000 detainees – yet only four torture and trauma counsellors.

Chris describes the trauma experienced by many detainees as “complex”. They commonly include intrusive memories and horrific nightmares, with people often frightened to fall asleep.

Grown men experience bed-wetting as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.

“For many people with an exposure to torture and trauma, detention just heightens their symptoms,” Chris explains. “Christmas Island is definitely not a place to heal.

For these clients the team would advocate, using their clinical findings, to the Department of Immigration. The process, as Chris explains, was incredibly frustrating.

“Each week I’d present the cases, appealing for people to be transferred into community detention on the mainland. When I was successful I could link the client into ongoing counselling, but such wins were few and far between. It became even harder after the introduction of the No Advantage policy in 2012, when it was made blatantly clear there would be no access to Australia if you arrived by boat.”

Amid the heartache, there were small moments of joy when Chris could have temporary guardianship of a detainee and do something really special for them. 

One such person was Mohammad, a 31 year-old Sudanese man who had survived arrest and torture before leaving his parents, siblings, wife and two children in a refugee camp in Darfur to seek asylum in Australia.

“Mohammad had vivid traumatic memories and lived with the uncertainty of his family’s safety back in Darfur.

"In our counselling sessions he literally couldn’t remember a happy day in his entire life.

"I took Mohammad and an interpreter out for the day. I prepared some lovely food, packed real cutlery and crockery – a table cloth for a picnic.

"We drove around the island, walked in the jungle, and ended up at a lookout.

"As we gazed across the sea, Mohammad smiled and said, ‘This is the happiest day of my life; this is happiness’.”

Despite the enormity of the issue, Chris believes things can, and will change for asylum seekers.

“We have to keep lobbying our policy makers – we have to jump up and down and make lots of noise. People seeing asylum are no different to you and I.

"They love their families, they feel pain. They deserve a life free of fear.”