Horrifying TV footage of a 17-year-old detention center inmate being assaulted, hooded and strapped to a restraint chair has sparked outrage in Australia and beyond.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has called for an immediate inquiry into the methods employed at the Don Dale facility, outside Darwin in the country’s Northern Territory. The brutality in the footage has been likened to the distressing scenes at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.
In a further development, the Northern Territory’s Correction Minister was fired yesterday, with the state’s Chief Minister Adam Giles promising to take over his duties personally. Giles claimed to be unaware of abuses at the facility. But in a masterpiece of understatement, he admitted that the restraining chair “didn’t look good on television.”
The footage aired Monday night in Australia’s Shame, a documentary on Australia’s ABC network. It focuses mainly on Dylan Voller, a troubled boy with behavioral difficulties who has been in trouble with the law for various misdemeanors since the age of 11. Collected CCTV images show a catalog of brutal incidents involving Voller, dating back to his first confinement in 2010.
Among other abuses, the images show:
- Voller being lifted by the neck and thrown across his cell.
- Voller being kneed and knocked to the ground by a guard while making a phone call.
- Voller being grabbed by the neck and stripped naked.
- Voller cowering while a guard assaults him and tries to block the CCTV camera.
- Voller and five others being teargassed while another inmate runs amok.
In the most recent filmed incident, which took place in March 2015, guards strapped Voller to a restraining chair by his ankles, wrists and neck, with a hood over his head. He remained there for two hours. A former guard at the Don Dale facility has told reporters that Voller had been restrained in this way on several occasions.
Australia’s record on human rights has been called into question on numerous occasions recently. It was strongly criticized by a UN committee in November 2015 for its treatment of its indigenous people as well as asylum seekers and refugees. Government proposals to deport asylum seekers onwards to destinations as diverse as Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Cambodia and Kyrgyzstan have also met widespread condemnation.
Australia’s Shame – watch the documentary in full here.
