There is something deeply unsettling about the way harm can become normalised when it is bureaucratised. When it is written into policy, absorbed into infrastructure, and managed through daily routine, it stops looking like violence, even as it continues to shape every aspect of a person’s life.

That is what is happening inside Villawood Immigration Detention Centre.

Sisters Inside has spent years alongside women navigating immigration detention, including those held at Villawood. When the Australian Human Rights Commission undertook its inspection, Sisters Inside contributed as consultants and, more importantly, carried the voices of women into that process. What they described was not ambiguous. Women spoke about feeling unsafe, about living with the constant threat of violence, about witnessing and experiencing harm that never quite settles. Some said plainly that they felt safer in prison than in immigration detention.

It is hard to overstate how serious that is. Prison in Australia is already a site of profound harm, particularly for women who are overwhelmingly survivors of violence themselves. For immigration detention to be experienced as worse, less safe, less controlled, more unpredictable, should have been a line in the sand.

Instead, it became another finding in a report.

The Commission produced 31 recommendations, several of them specifically addressing conditions at Villawood. They were not abstract or aspirational. They spoke directly to what women need to live with some degree of dignity: access to appropriate services, infrastructure that allows for safety and privacy, spaces that are self-contained and responsive to women’s lives. Even something as basic as access to a qualified female hairdresser was raised, not as a luxury, but as a recognition that identity, culture and self-presentation matter, particularly in environments designed to strip them away.

Read the full article on Women are being retraumatised inside Villawood and nothing is changing