Listen to thisAUSTRALIA
Last night, Four Corners aired footage exposing the extreme and reprehensible child abuse occurring in youth detention facilities in the Northern Territory. Today, the somewhat predictable response from our prime minister has been to launch a royal commission into the abuse.
Let’s not waste our time. Nothing short of the complete and immediate shut down of youth detention centres will do.
The premise behind a royal commission is that exposing the horrors that incarcerated youth have suffered is a way of securing reform and ending the mistreatment. But in reality, a royal commission is just a way of temporarily appeasing our scandalised consciences and passing responsibility over to a well-paid team of lawyers and bureaucrats.
For a start, let’s not pretend that people didn’t already know that these abuses were occurring. Priscilla Collins, CEO of the North Australia Aboriginal Justice Agency, has revealed that the footage from the juvenile detention facility had surfaced years ago. We already knew that Indigenous children are 24 times more likely to be incarcerated than non-Indigenous children. As long ago as 1991, the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody investigated the deaths of Indigenous youth held in detention, some driven to suicide. And the current royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse has already exposed how vulnerable children are to sexual abuse when held in institutional settings.
The fact is that knowing these things hasn’t generated the political will to change anything. After all, it has been 25 years since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody released its final report, and still Indigenous men and women are dying in police jails as a result of policies that fly in the face of recommendations issued by the royal commission.
More fundamentally, we have to reject the idea that putting children in cages can ever be a humane or sensible policy.
The institution of juvenile detention is corrupt at its core. We are ripping vulnerable children from their families and communities, isolating them from the supportive relationships that offer the real key to rehabilitation. We strip search them, lock them in cages, put them in uniforms, take away their individuality and their self-esteem.
Across the world, violence and abuse in juvenile detention facilities is the norm, not the exception. It is the predictable consequence of environments where extreme power imbalances exist, where day-to-day operations take place far away from the public eye, and where children are caged like animals and stripped of their humanity.
Countless studies have shown that juvenile prisons do nothing other than re-traumatise already victimised children and return them to our streets more damaged, disconnected, and dangerous than before.
The endless quest for more data, more information, more documentation, is one of our favourite ways of abdicating responsibility for the atrocities our society commits. We can channel the scandal into a process, dampen the outrage and stall responses. And the real reason that this is deemed a sufficient response is that the majority of Australians know, consciously or unconsciously, that these institutions were built for “other people’s kids” – the delinquent child who is of a different colour or of a different class.
The majority of Australians have the privilege of never having to seriously ask “what if that was my child?”
We should not settle for a royal commission. Now is the time to take to the streets and protest; to bring down the Northern Territory government and force the one that comes next to be accountable. And to shut down youth detention facilities in the NT and Australia for good.
Kathleen Heath
25 July 2016
