Aboriginal teenagers hooded and gassed in detention
A report tabled in the Northern Territory Parliament by NT child commissioner Colleen Gwynne and her predecessor Howard Bath on 17 September has revealed extensive child abuse in the soon-to-be-closed Don Dale Youth Detention Centre.
The violence includes 23 hours a day solitary confinement, tear-gassing of children as young as 14 in their cells, the use of fabric hoods to transport children and forcing children to fight each other and eat animal faeces in exchange for junk food.
The report was prompted by events that occurred at the centre in 2014. According to ABC News, a report was filed to police claiming that “five young people had escaped their cells, assaulting staff with shards of glass, bricks and steel poles”.
NT Corrections commissioner Ken Middlebrook told ABC radio Darwin that he authorised the use of tear gas and a prison security dog in retaliation because “staff were at risk”. The teenagers were later hooded and transferred to the maximum security jail block of an adult prison, according to Rodney Dillon, Indigenous rights adviser with Amnesty International Australia.
If deploying dogs and tear gas against children were not appalling enough, Gwynne and Bath have now discovered that the report filed with police was “inaccurate and misleading”. Contrary to Middlebrook’s claims, they discovered that only one of the children had escaped his cell (it had been left unlocked by a staff member) and that there had been “no meaningful attempt by staff to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the incident”.
Damningly, complaints about the “indefinite nature of the confinement” and “the unhygienic living conditions” in the centre from an anonymous individual had previously been lodged with and apparently ignored by the child commissioner’s office in early August this year. Only after the resistance of the detained children and the heavy-handed tear gas response was the matter seriously looked into.
Since the revelation of the tear gas incident, further incidents of abuse have come to light. At a forum for youth justice workers in Darwin, a former detainee at Don Dale, Travis, 15, reported that staff members had forced children to fight, rewarding the winner with extra soft drinks and chocolate.
The allegation has been rigorously denied by the corrections commissioner. However, his denial is questionable following comments from Jared Sharp, spokesperson for the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency, who told the Australian on 23 September that they had received complaints from “about a dozen young people” alleging further cases of violence from staff members.
These are just some of many recent disturbing incidents of institutionalised violence against Aboriginal children. Another occurred in the early hours of 15 January 2014, when the Department of Family and Community Services, assisted by NSW Police in riot gear, stormed a family home in Moree, NSW, seizing eight children aged between 1 and 13.
Their father told National Indigenous Television that he and his partner were handcuffed at gunpoint while they watched their children taken away to be placed in foster care.
“We’ve received nothing but torture, pain and emptiness inside our home, heart and soul and in our mind”, he said.
