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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
7 6 September 2016
INTERNATIONAL
O
n July 25th 2016, Australia's ABC net-
work broadcast a documentary from
its 'Four Corners' series that was to
shake the country’s reputation.
'Australia's Shame', exposed the
conditions and practices of the Northern Terri-
tory's Don Dale youth detention facility in
Darwin, and revealed the harrowing circum
-
stances in which children were being kept. Of
the detainees incarcerated at Don Dale, 98%
were Aboriginal children, some as young as ten.
In CCTV footage obtained from 2014 onward
it was clear that children were being held in iso-
lation cells for up to 24 hours a day, sometimes
for weeks on end in a detention block that
reeked of urine and faeces. Children had to eat
meals using their hands, losing track of time
and not knowing when, or if, they would be
released back into the main detainee
population.
A child is seen being dragged away from a
phone by one of the guards – apparently for
spending too long using it, kneed in the stom-
ach, punched in the head and knocked to the
ground. The child is then dragged out of the
common room with the help of another member
of staff. From accounts given by some of the
Aboriginal children, such abuses were
commonplace.
In another scene, reminiscent of Abu Ghraib
or Guantanamo Bay, a half-naked child is bound
by the ankles and wrists to a 'mechanical chair'.
The boy's face is covered with a 'spit hood' – a
brown cloth sack - and he is left alone in the
room for close to two hours. This, according to
'Four Corners', was common practice in Don
Dale.
What really discomfited the public, however
was the 'tear gas incident' as shown in the doc-
umentary. Caught on CCTV, a child held in the
isolation wing is seen leaving his cell, which
had mistakenly been left unlocked by one of the
guards. The child, disorientated, confused and
having been left there for days, begins striking
a door with a light fixture.
How the guards reacted was reprehensible.
This time recorded on an officer's handy-cam,
one officer is heard saying: “Go get the fu*kin'
gas and gas them through”, after which the cell
block is sprayed ten times with tear gas. A news
release falsely asserted that six boys had
escaped from their cells and guards told police
it was a “riot” but it involved, as shown on
CCTV, just one detainee. The incident saw the
remaining locked cells, housing five other boys,
engulfed with the gas for a total of eight
minutes.
Children were pictured cowering beneath
blankets, scared for their lives and struggling
to breathe. After the eight minutes, the children
were then marched outside, wrists bound,
thrown face down on the ground and their
heads sprayed with a fire hose. Guard laughter
intersperses the recording.
Lawyer Jared Sharp, who works with the
North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency and
contributed to the 'Four Corners' documentary
- has represented many of the children of Don
Dale. He has been scathing in his criticisms of
the brutal and at times barbaric conditions
there. He told Village:
“In 2014 I went to Don Dale with some of my
colleagues and we were taken on a tour of the
facility. As part of the tour, we were taken to this
back area, which could only be described as a
dungeon; it was damp, dark and actually pretty
medieval looking. There were no immediate
signs of life, but as we were being shown
through the area we heard noises. I said to the
guards: ‘there aren't kids in there, are there?’.
They said there were, and it raised alarm bells
straight away.
When we looked we saw that these boys were
being kept locked up in these tiny little cells.
There was no natural light, no air-conditioning
and no running water. Some of them had been
kept there for weeks. It was after we found out
who these boys were that we began to docu-
ment the conditions they were being kept in and
then to try to advocate for them to get out”.
Jared wrote to the then Corrections Minister
demanding these issues be addressed. In his
letter he highlighted the physical conditions in
which children in solitary confinement were
being held, and said that the most striking thing
was the “removal of all hope” - how the children
were left feeling they were being detained for
an indeterminate period of time, without any
hope of being returned to the main part of the
detention centre.
When a satisfactory response wasn't forth-
coming, Jared wrote to the Children's Minister,
and an investigation was immediately launched.
However, questions were raised about the inde-
pendence of the investigation, since it was
conducted by a superintendent of a New South
Wales youth detention centre who was known
to the Corrections Commissioner.
The investigation was also conducted over a
very short period so that there were serious
questions as to how rigorous and detailed its
analysis was. However, as a result of it, a damn-
ing report of the practices at Don Dale was
made, along with a list of recommendations.
Despite this, abuses continued to happen at the
centre:
“Since the tear-gassing incident we've seen
many incidents of young people being treated
below the standards that any reasonable
person would find acceptable, and beneath the
standards that international law requires.
Australienating
Institutionalised abuse of Aboriginal
children in the Northern Territory
by Ken Phelan
A half-naked child is
bound by the ankles and
wrists to a 'mechanical
chair'. The boy's face is
covered with a 'spit hood'
Children were pictured
engulfed with gas,
cowering beneath blankets,
scared for their lives and
struggling to breathe
September 2016 7 7
Things like use of force, use of restraints, use
of isolation and being kept in a facility that is
really not fit for purpose.
The children are currently being kept in a
facility that was an adult prison, and was
decommissioned because it was deemed no
longer suitable to hold adults. This is the same
facility where some of these children have had
family members incarcerated, some of whom
have committed suicide, so it's a facility that's
associated with enormous despair and anguish
amongst the Aboriginal community”.
One glaring omission of the 2014 investiga-
tion concerned children who suffered self-harm/
suicide ideation. A child who displayed signs of
self-harm/suicide ideation was accorded 'at
risk' status. Once deemed 'at risk', the child was
subject to exceptional treatment: guards
coming into their cell, cutting their clothes off,
stripping them naked and leaving them there
overnight. This practice has been in place at
Don Dale for a number of years.
Most of the Aboriginal children are pulled
from very disadvantaged backgrounds – where
there has been trauma, violence, sexual abuse,
neglect and entrenched poverty. About one in
three of them are in the care of the welfare
department and have been removed from the
family unit. Many children have mental health
issues, mostly left undiagnosed. These prob-
lems are not unique to the Aboriginal
community, but are exacerbated by extreme
poverty and disadvantage. On the issue of why
there is such a disproportionate number of Abo-
riginal children in custody, Jared says:
“I believe a lot of it is to do with systemic
racism and the ongoing impact of colonisation.
A lot of these detentions would appear to be
racially motivated. Whether it's also because of
the physical circumstances of poverty or
because of the psychological impacts of colo-
nisation and dispossession I don't know, but
what I do know is that the kids I represent are
often very alienated and marginalised.
We have practices here in the Northern Terri-
tory that are very punitive. Police will target
so-called serious young offenders and the way
they target them is quite extreme, given that
they're children. We have a justice system that
is really ill-equipped to meet the needs of these
children and that is overtly punitive. We don't
have the type of responses to deal with trauma
amongst Aboriginal people, to support them
and help get their lives back on track and I think
we're the only jurisdiction in Australia that
doesn't have any Aboriginal justice
programmes”.
The abuses are embarrassing for a modern
democracy like Australia, albeit that it has long
intermittently scandalised the world with inde
-
cent treatment of minorities and immigrants.
For Irish people in particular with our back-
ground of institutional abuse it is interesting to
know what Jared thinks grounds the abuse:
“I think any organisation that doesn't have
strong checks and balances is susceptible to
these sort of things happening. In the Northern
Territory, our institutions are very fragile,
there's no independent oversight of correc
-
tions, police or government agencies - they're
left to police themselves in the majority of
cases. We also know that the workforce has
been under-trained, or scandalously untrained.
We still don't have a trained workforce at this
point; it's moving in that direction, but there are
serious questions over expertise in corrections
to manage the workforce. They have no speciali-
zation of dealing with children, of adolescent
behaviour and trauma, and unfortunately as we
speak, they are continuing to apply an adult cor-
rections model to children and are not learning
the lessons of the past”.
One disturbing aspect of the issues sur-
rounding Don Dale is the fact that children from
the age of ten-years-old are detained there.
Inexplicably, these young children would be
subject to some of the abuses inflicted upon
other detainees. It would seem unthinkable for
a young child to be strapped to a chair with a
hood over their head, being beaten or kept in
solitary confinement for days or weeks. As Jared
says:
“It's outrageous that Don Dale houses 10, 11
and 12-year-olds, and it speaks of the systemic
failures of the justice system as a whole. In my
mind there should never be circumstances
where 10, 11 or 12-year-olds are in a detention
centre. What the criminal law acknowledges for
all children is that culpability and criminal
knowledge of behaviour is less and less the
younger children are, so for a ten year-old the
criminal culpability will always be extremely
low.
If they are committing offences it's almost
always going to be because of abuse they've
experienced, or deprivation and disadvantage
they are suffering, so therapeutic responses
must always be used. As we speak, I've got cli-
ents in Don Dale who are 12 years of age. I think
there are fundamental failures of our child pro-
tection system when welfare is using detention
as a so-called 'placement' because they can't
manage them in the community. That is an
indictment of our child protection system when
it cannot provide safe alternative places for
these children to reside”.
The 'Four Corners' documentary has had a
major impact on the courts, so that now there
is a greater emphasis on finding alternatives to
detention. With a population of only 250,000 in
the Northern Territory, it is also hoped that
detention centre numbers will reduce so they
become proportionate to the population.
In the wake of the 'Four Corners' documen-
tary and following protests all over Australia, a
Royal Commission into Juvenile Detention in the
Northern Territory was established to investi-
gate conditions and practices in Don Dale and
other detention centres. Though it is uncertain
what impact the commission will have, it is
hoped that it will instigate much-needed
change and reform. The wider issue, however,
is the grossly disproportionate number of Abo-
riginal children in detention.
“We've got to provide alternatives to deten-
tion so that we don't have so many Aboriginal
children ending up in places like Don Dale. At
the moment, we have a justice system that is
still very white and mainstream and is not
adapted to the needs of the Aboriginal people.
“The real tragedy and the most overlooked
point is that all of these kids are Aboriginal. This
is the legacy of colonisation, that so many of
these kids end up here. Many of these arrests
are racially motivated which is why indigenous
Australians make up 98% of the detainee popu-
lation. We need to find an alternative to
detention, support these kids as best we can
and finally seek justice for Northern Territory
Aboriginal children”.
Abuse at the Don Dale child detention
centre in the Northern Territory
