Growing up in detention: Casualties of Australia’s refugee system

Since they were 15, Mehdi and Adnan have been trapped – detained as “unauthorised” arrivals by an asylum system that will never let them resettle. Eight years later, they still ask: Why?

“My father’s friend made a decision for me — he put me on a boat.” Mehdi looks up straight at the camera, speaking via Zoom from a detention facility in Brisbane.

The same thing happened to his cousin, Adnan.

It was this life-changing moment that set the boys, then both 15 years old, on course for an adolescence in one of the most notorious refugee systems in the world.