Medical and educational experts who have spent time with asylum seeker children detained by Australia have backed calls for their immediate release.
It follows a report by a medical team led by the Australian Human Rights Commission that found what it describes as alarming evidence about the mental and physical health of children held at the Wickham Point detention facility in Darwin.
Naomi Selvaratnam has more on the investigation titled, The health and well-being of children in immigration detention.
Paediatricians, Professor Elizabeth Elliott and Dr Hasantha Gunasekera, assessed 69 children being held at the Wickham Point detention centre in Darwin.
As part of an inquiry by the Human Rights Commission they, too, examined the parents of 15 children born in immigration detention.
Many of the children detained in the Northern Territory had also spent time in Australia's asylum seeker processing facility on Nauru.
Professor Elliott says she was shocked by what she found.
"These were very, very traumatised children. We had young children regressing in their behaviour or failing to develop. We had young children threatening self-harm or self-harming. We had older children saying that they felt that maybe if they killed themselves that would be the way out. There was a lack of hope for any future in many of these children."
Professor Elliott says the children taking part in the investigation were among the most traumatised they had ever seen in 50 years of combined professional experience.
Of the children over eight years old who had previously been detained on Nauru, 95 per cent were assessed as being in the 'clinical' range, or at risk of post-traumatic stress disorder.
PTSD is a condition of persisting medical and emotional stress brought on by significant trauma.
Professor Elliott says most of the children observed also lacked emotional support from their carers, who were equally traumatised.
"We witnessed the human environment which was very depressed mothers who were unable to relate well to their children. And we witnessed children who had significant mental health problems and by this I mean they were clearly traumatised not only by what they'd seen in their own country and the journey to Australia but being moved between detention centres and living in prolonged detention."
A former teacher at a school for asylum seekers on Nauru, Evan Davis told the A-B-C he isn't surprised by the findings concerning child detainees at Wickham Point.
Mr Davis says they share similarities with what he witness among his own students on Nauru.
"From my experience and from the students that I taught and also the parents, it was quite obvious that they were traumatised. A lot of these people have gone through very or come through backgrounds that are violent, life threatening situations and they're genuinely trying to escape those places. They try to come to Australia seeking refuge from that and they're put on a tiny little pacific island and they're subjected to abuse and they're subjected to deprivation of their liberty."
The Human Rights Commission's report comes after the High Court ruled Australia's offshore detention system, which also takes in Papua New Guinea's Manus Island, to be lawful.
Refugee advocates fear the decision paves the way for more than 260 asylum seekers -- among them over 90 children -- currently in Australia to be deported to Nauru.
That's amid allegations of rape and other mistreatment of children on the Pacific island, and as some doctors risked possible jail time under the Border Force Act for speaking about asylum seeker cases they've treated.
The Commission's President Gillian Triggs says transferring children or their families to Nauru places Australia at risk of breaching its obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
"The findings were disturbing. In short, detention -- whether on Christmas Island, Nauru or centres on the Australian mainland -- is dangerous and unsafe for children. 34 per cent of the hundreds of children we visited has severe to moderate mental illness compared with 2 per cent for children in the Australian community. Today, Australia continues to detain about 80 children, including babies at the Wickam Point in Darwin."
Professor Elizabeth Elliott agrees that detaining children negatively impacts upon their mental health.
She says the federal government should release all children from immigration detention.
"What we are concerned about is that these children are currently in our care. We believe that detention is traumatising them and that this trauma will have a lifelong impact and we believe that these children will be best served by being in a community setting and/or allowed to apply for temporary visas. Rather than being detained in what they perceive to be a jail-like setting."
The Human Rights Commission says there are 174 children in closed immigration detention facilities in Australia and on Nauru.
It says 331 children are being held in community detention in Australia.
The Commission adds that children are detained in the Nauru processing centre because of Australia's system of transferring asylum seekers, including children, who come by boat to third countries.
