How immigration detention harms children: A conceptual framework to inform policy and practice.

Objective: This paper identifies the multiple adversities and trauma experienced by children who are detained after seeking asylum. A conceptual framework identifies the specific impact of immigration detention on the psychosocial development and mental health of refugee children that can inform policy and prevent additional migration-related trauma. Method: The paper draws on international evidence about the impact of childhood adversity, challenges faced by all displaced children, and the additional negative consequences of immigration detention. It integrates socioecological, temporal, and relational approaches to identify the pathways through which detention of forcibly displaced children causes preventable harm. The public health and human rights implications are identified. Conceptual framework: The framework draws on Bronfenbrenner’s socioecological model and has the child, their development, and experience at the center. Refugee children are exposed to cumulative adversity during displacement, flight, and resettlement. Immigration detention is associated with multiple additional adversities and human rights violations. International and national contexts and the detention environment impact on family functioning and directly on the child’s well-being. Conclusions: Immigration detention is a preventable and profoundly negative reception experience for already vulnerable children. It is unavoidably associated with multiple additional adverse exposures with significant health and public health consequences. The proposed framework demonstrates adversity in each socioecological sphere of the detained child’s life and across time. The framework can inform migration, child protection, and public health policy. Advocacy and political action to end this practice are urgently required to prevent further harm. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved) Immigration detention undermines family life and increases refugee children’s exposure to adversity, including through increased risks of family separation, parental mental disorder, and exposure to institutional and interpersonal violence. This has cumulative negative impacts on health and well-being. The proposed framework identifies multiple additional adversities faced by displaced children who are held in immigration detention on reception. Symptomatic children require expert, trauma-informed care in independent health services. Clinicians practicing in settings that create and perpetuate ill health face ethical challenges. Immigration detention of children represents a preventable public health crisis. Advocacy and political action to end this practice are urgently required to prevent further harm.