Shocking videos from across the globe shows teenagers being hooded and left in restraints for hours and subjected to tear gassing at a juvenile detention center in Australia. A lawyer said the teens' treatment at facilities in the country's Northern Territory were par with the way prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, according to ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
Investigative journalism series Four Corners, which is basically the 60 Minutes of Australia, obtained videos taken by guards at youth detention centers in Darwin and Alice Springs, Australia. The videos show one boy, Dylan Voller, strapped into a chair after guards tell him he's "misbehaved by chewing on his mattress and threatening to break his hand," ABC reported.
Here's the transcript of the video.
Guard: "You just can't put toilet paper everywhere, you can't rip your, you can't start chewing on your mattress. You can't do that stuff, you know that."
Another video shows a group of six boys being tear gassed in 2014. Detention center officials told the media at the time that the gassing was due to a riot, though Four Corners reported that the video shows that only one boy had actually escaped from his cell, and several others were gassed while they were in their cells and not misbehaving.
And another of the disturbing videos shows a 13-year-old boy talking on a phone when a guard walks in and rips the phone from his hand before kneeing him and knocking him to the ground.
The release of the footage has apparently prompted Australian Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs to call for an official investigation into the mistreatment at the facilities. Several more of the videos appear on the ABC YouTube channel.
