Can this be true?

[***super_nova***]

Officer disciplined for calling asylum seekers by numbers instead of names

Serco confirms that asylum seekers as young as 12 referred to by boat ID numbers at privately operated detention centre

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/30/officer-disciplined-for-calling-asylum-seekers-by-numbe...

[grandmoon]

Yes

[freshwater-2]

I imagine that many of the names are unprounceable to an English speaker and many unrelated have similar names.

[the_great_she_elephant]

I have four friends on Facebook all with the surname Brown - only two of them are related - but I've never felt the need to refer to any of them by numbers.

[icyfroth]

I believe Mohammed is the most common name in NSW these days

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/muhammads-a-sign-of-the-times-varying-spellings-of-it-are-...

[lakeland27]

 gee icy are you sure

[the_great_she_elephant]

---

@icyfroth wrote:

I believe Mohammed is the most common name in NSW these days

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/muhammads-a-sign-of-the-times-varying-spellings-of-it-are-...

---

I guess you believe wrong then. 

http://www.bdm.nsw.gov.au/resources/stats-names-2011-13.pdf

[freshwater-2]

I have four friends on Facebook all with the surname Brown - only two of them are related - but I've never felt the need to refer to any of them by numbers.

How does this relate to a great number of asylum seekers, with Arabic and other names, no/little English, and a vocabulary which is difficult for English speakers to  pronounce.  I speak a few phrases of Arabic from my past life and it is not easy.  

I don't think there would be many Browns and Smiths among the refugees.

[cherry*135]

That is disgraceful calling them by numbers. Shade of German concentration camps were the Jews had numbers tatooed on them and were dealt with by all  as numbers not humans.

If there names are long and difficult maybe too bad, my first name isn't that common, no-one (school, Uni, work) has ever given me a number instead of having to pronounce it.

[jethro_woolfe]

I'd expect they would have foreign sounding names. In contemporary Australia these people are numbers more or less  ? lets call a spade a spade.