Amnesty International on Thursday revealed images from inside Townsville's Cleveland Youth Detention Centre in northern Queensland.
The images, obtained by the human rights organisation under Freedom of Information, depict alleged mistreatment of the juvenile inmates by guards. They form part of 1000 documents released to Amnesty.
“The callous, brutal attitude towards vulnerable children from some detention centre staff, which we see in these screenshots, is symptomatic of a broken criminal justice system,” Roxanne Moore, Indigenous rights campaigner at Amnesty International Australia, told SBS.
Amnesty is now calling for an independent investigation across all detention centres in Australia.
Ms Moore believes the system falters by dealing out punishment rather than focusing on prevention and rehabilitation.
Alleged use of force on a youth at a Townsville detention centre. Source: Amnesty International
"These kids usually have suffered social, family or health problems in their lives: that’s how they ended up in there in the first place. They need specialised support, not to be further traumatised."
One incident, which occurred in January 2013, involved a 17-year-old boy who was deemed to be at risk of suicide.
CCTV images show 14 staff approaching him after he refuses to return to his room. Several hold him down on the floor, putting him in handcuffs and binding his legs. They take him to an isolated cell where they cut his clothing and underpants off with a knife, leaving him naked in the cell for over an hour.
In another incident in 2015, a guard let an dog without a muzzle approach an Indigenous girl in an “aggressive manner” while she was attempting to get out of a pool.
Amnesty International said using dogs to instil fear into prisoners was "a torture method used around the world."
A spokesperson from the Queensland Department of Justice told SBS it was unable to comment on the matter because of privacy legislation relating to juveniles that worked to "protect young people in the justice system".
Source: Amnesty International
However the spokesperson encouraged any young person to make a complaint about an incident that concerned them so that the department could "thoroughly" investigate.
"The department has a zero tolerance approach towards violence against young people."
Dogs had been deployed to maintain security around the building site and not to interact with people, the spokesperson added.
"When centre management became aware that private security dogs had been used in an incident relating to young people in a pool in August 2015, a direction was issued by centre management that they were no longer to use the security dogs."
The documents come as Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D'Ath defended the state's youth justice system following unrest at a Townsville youth detention centre last weekend.
While she said it would be subject to an investigation, she emphasised it had been “deescalated” without using force.
"Taking a confrontational course may have resulted in potentially more property damage, and maybe even injuries to staff or the children involved," she told state parliament on Thursday.
"It clearly demonstrates to the children, some of whom would have seen so much physical confrontation in their lives, that physical confrontation is not the only way to resolve a situation."
Indigenous children at 'greatest risk' of harm
Amnesty's Ms Moore said she believed this sort of alleged abuse was happening across Australia, predominantly to Indigenous children because they are vastly overrepresented in detention.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Queensland are 22 times more likely to be detained than non-Indigenous children. On an average day, nearly 90 per cent of children in Cleveland Youth Detention Centre are Indigenous, despite that Indigenous children comprise just 8 per cent of the youth population of Queensland.
The Queensland government "must appoint an independent inspector, entirely separate from government, to investigate every allegation of abuse in detention and make the findings public".
"The federal government should ensure that these systems of independent inspection are set up across Australia, for all places of detention," Ms Moore said.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called for a royal commission into child detention a day after ABC's Four Corners showed CCTV footage of prison guards using excessive force on children at Don Dale Detention Centre in the Northern Territory.
With AAP
