The footage, aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), showed CCTV video of children being detained at the Don Dale Youth Detention Center in Darwin, in the far north of the country.
The grim images show officers grabbing the neck of a boy named Dylan Voller and throwing him to the ground. He is then subsequently stripped naked. Another video shows Voller being teargased by correctional officers, who just seconds before can be heard saying they wanted to “pulverize” him.
Voller suffered some of this abuse when he was just 13. He was on the receiving end of violence for over four years.
"Like all Australians, I've been deeply shocked - shocked and appalled by the images of [the] mistreatment of children, "Turnbull said, as quoted by Reuters.
Meanwhile, Jeanie Marie Walker, a human rights activist from Adelaide, told RT that the footage was “like something out of a horror story.”
“No child should be confined for any length of time. These children have been teargased, sworn at, thrown on the ground, handcuffed, and rushed by a large number of adults wearing gas masks,” she said.
“This is like something out of a horror story and it certainly should not form the basis for any form of therapeutic rehabilitation model.”
Another image in the footage shows Voller with a hood over his head and neck, and his hands strapped to a chair. Changes to legislation this year in the Northern Territory have made it legal to use mechanical restraints on minors.
“Watching the program was harrowing. To see a crying, distressed child seized by his neck, forced to the ground, manhandled, stripped naked by three grown men and left naked in a cell is just sickening,” said Julian Cleary, an Indigenous rights campaigner at Amnesty International Australia.
“The footage of guards laughing at a child being tear-gassed and in distress defies belief,” he stated in a report on the organization’s website.
The video material was filmed between 2010 and 2014 at the detention center in the Northern Territory. Lawyer Peter O'Brien, who is representing Voller, says that the “abuse is built into the very core of the system” and has called for Voller - who is now serving time in an adult prison in Alice Springs - to be released, along with all other children imprisoned in the Northern Territory.
Despite making up just three percent of the country's total population, 27 percent of Australia’s prison population is made up of Aborigines. The figure for the Northern Territory is even more alarming, with 94 percent of juvenile inmates being Aborigines, RT reported.
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