Are Healthcare Professionals Working in Australia's Immigration Detention Centres Condoning Torture?

Australian immigration detention centres are in secluded locations, some on offshore islands, and are subject to extreme secrecy, comparable with 'black sites' elsewhere. 

There are parallels between healthcare professionals working in immigration detention centres and healthcare professionals involved with or complicit in torture. In both cases, healthcare professionals are conflicted between a duty of care to improve the health of patients and the interests of the government. While this duality of interests has been recognised previously, the full implications for healthcare professionals working in immigration detention have not been addressed. 

The Australian Government maintains that immigration detention is needed for security checks, but the average duration of immigration detention has increased from 10 weeks to 14 months, and detainees are not informed of the progress of their application for refugee status. Long-term immigration detention causes major mental health problems, is illegal in international law and arguably fulfils the recognised definition of torture. 

It is generally accepted that healthcare professionals should not participate in or condone torture. Australian healthcare professionals thus face a major ethical dilemma: patients in immigration detention have pressing mental and physical health needs, but providing healthcare might support or represent complicity in a practice that is unethical. 

Individual healthcare professionals need to decide whether or not to work in immigration detention centres. If they do so, they need to decide for how long and to what extent restrictive contracts and gagging laws will constrain them from advocating for closing detention centres.

Purchase full article at:   http://goo.gl/fAyLXk

By:   Isaacs D1.

• 1Department of Infectious Diseases & Microbiology, Children's Hospital at Westmead, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia Discipline of Child Health, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.  

More at:  https://twitter.com/hiv insight

And: http://twitter.com/Prison Health

"I Am Tired But If I Don't Try To Have Sex, My Wife Will Think I've Been Fooling Around in the City": Work, Migration & Sex among Vietnamese Migrant Laborers

Mostly operating from a risk and risk-reduction paradigm, existing research on migrants in Vietnam tends to conceptualize sex and risky sexual behaviors as isolated life domains. 

This study begins to develop a contextually rich understanding of migrants' sex lives by examining the relationships among sex, work, and the constant pendulum-like migrating movements of 23 Vietnamese married migrants in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. 

Using data from in-depth interviews, it was found that most participants had no sex in the city; this was followed by visits to the home village, where they had sex with their spouses as often as possible to make up for the "long drought" in the city. 

Within this sexual schema, sex came secondary, and even peripherally, to migrants' working lives; thus, exhaustion from work was cited by migrants as the overwhelming factor leading to their sexual problems. 

This study suggests that migrants' intimate lives are more strongly linked to their working lives than has previously been recognized, and that their sexual behaviors should be viewed in tandem with the hardships of their working lives.

Purchase full article at:   http://goo.gl/psao71

By:   Nguyen HN1, Hardesty M, Hong KT.

• 1School of Social Work, San Jose State University, One Washington Square, San Jose, CA 95192, USA. huong.nguyen@sjsu.edu 

More at:  https://twitter.com/hiv_insight

And: http://twitter.com/Prison_Health

Circular Labor Migration and HIV in India: Exploring Heterogeneity in Bridge Populations Connecting Areas of High and Low HIV Infection Prevalence

The emerging human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemics in rural areas of India are hypothesized to be linked to circular migrants who are introducing HIV from destination areas were the prevalence of HIV infection is higher. We explore the heterogeneity in potential roles of circular migrants in driving an HIV epidemic in a rural area in north India and examine the characteristics of the “sustaining bridge population”, which comprises individuals at risk of HIV acquisition at destination and of HIV transmission into networks at origin capable of sustaining an epidemic.

Results of a behavioral survey of 639 male migrants from Azamgarh district, India, were analyzed using χ² tests and logistic regression.

We estimated the size of various subgroups defined by specific sexual behaviors across different locations and over time. Only 20% fit our definition of a sustaining bridge population, with the majority making no apparent contribution to geographical connectedness between high- and low-prevalence areas. However, we found evidence of sexual contacts at origin that could potentially sustain an epidemic once HIV is introduced. Variables associated with sustaining bridge population membership were self-perceived HIV risk, current migrant status, and age.

Circular migrants represent a heterogeneous population in terms of their role as a bridge group. Self-perception of heightened risk could be exploited in designing prevention programs.

Below:  Distribution of migrant men in the sample according to their sexual behavior at origin and destination

Full article at: http://goo.gl/cmqPEY

By: Tanvi Rai,1 Helen S. Lambert,2 Annick B. Borquez,1 Niranjan Saggurti,3 Bidhubhushan Mahapatra,3 and Helen Ward1

¹Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Imperial College London

²School of Social and Community Medicine, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

³Population Council of India, New Delhi

Correspondence: Tanvi Rai, PhD, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, Norfolk Pl, W2 1PG London, UK (Email:ku.ca.lairepmi@70iar.ivnat).

   

More at:  https://twitter.com/hiv_insight