Northern territory prison brutalisation

Here is how Four Corners presenter Sarah Ferguson described the above scene - of Dylan Voller being strapped to a restraint chair:

The image you have just seen isn’t from Guantanamo bay.... or Abu Ghraib.. but Australia in 2015… A boy, hooded, shackled, strapped to a chair and left alone. It is barbaric.

This is juvenile justice in the Northern Territory, a system that punishes troubled children instead of rehabilitating them

As I said yesterday:

No reason was given for what was presented as gratuitous torture....

But the ABC omitted the context that explains why he was restrained. Voller has been in and out of detention centres since he was 11. A court was told he’d attacked his mother and had committed more than 50 offences so far, many violent.

He’d got on ice, tried to run down a policeman and joined in a pack attack that left a victim unconscious. He’d spat at detention centre staff hundreds of times and before he was strapped into that chair, footage not aired by the ABC shows the guards telling Voller he’d been chewing on his mattress and had “unfortunately ... put yourself in here by going at risk”.

Voller replies: “I’m going to break my hand anyway ... I’ll snap my bone through my skin.” The guard then says Voller must then be strapped to a restraint chair to help him “keep chilling out”. The hood is actually a mesh to stop him spitting on guards.

There may well be a better way to stop a strong young man from spitting on staff and harming himself. But to simply present this as torture of an essentially harmless boy is misleading and inflammatory.

But this is all that Four Corners said about Voller’s record:

A troubled boy with behavioural problems, Dylan Voller has been in and out of juvenile detention since he was 11 years old.

For car theft, robberies and, more recently, assault. He’s one of the Northern Territory’s most notorious young offenders.

But he himself is a victim and there’s a lot the public doesn’t know about the plight of Dylan Voller.

Here are more details Four Corners refused to report - perhaps for fear that the context might moderate the outrage it wanted to incite:

Voller’s spree began in Alice Spring’s iconic Todd Street, where he and the two other young men tried to rob a man walking to work.

A court later heard that Voller, then a slightly built teen, ran bare-chested at the man, yelling “you fat white racist dog. You yelled at us”.

The three teens took the man’s wallet, knocked him to the pavement and kicked him in the ribs.

Still high on drugs the following day, the boys ambushed Luke McIntyre near a store where the 17-year-old was trying to buy cigarettes.

Voller struck him with a mop handle, punched him in the face and stole his wallet. Mr McIntyre was bashed unconscious, then his three assailants fled in a Holden Commodore.

Voller was behind the wheel and tried to run down a “terrified” Constable Gerard Reardon who had ordered the trio to stop.

But the ABC has instead deployed its massive power to portray Voller as an innocent child victim of torture. Here is how one ABC report pictured the strapping teen:
image

I think Four Corners has fundamentally misrepresented Voller as a mere “boy” and a “victim”, and misrepresented the restraint of this violent and potentially self-harming teenager as torture.