Add Category
A former detainee of Tasmania's youth detention centre has urged the commission to "tear the place down and start again".
Warning: Readers may find the details of this story distressing.
Key points:
- Fred* said one unit was known as the "gladiator pit" because there were so many fights between detainees
- He said he made two complaints during his time at Ashley but they went nowhere
- He said all of Tasmania's detention centres "lack any form of rehabilitation and are punitive"
Fred* was 17 years old when he entered the Ashley Youth Detention Centre, in the state's north.
Like other former detainees who have given evidence at the Commission of Inquiry into the Tasmanian Government's Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Institutional Settings, Fred spoke about the excessive use of force by guards, being assaulted by other detainees and invasive strip searches.
"You feel very belittled," he said.
"You've got three or four grown men on top of you. Their knees in your back or your head or your neck. If you're not taking your clothes off, they're taking them off for you.
"It was yuck, it was harrowing. I hated it."
'Fights every day'
He said the Franklin unit where he was placed was also known as the "gladiator pit" because there were so many fights between detainees.
"There were fights in there every day," he told the hearing.
"Some were staff versus inmates, but never in my experience, it was mainly inmate versus inmate."
He said he was assaulted on multiple occasions and the youth workers did not always step in to help.
"The worst couple were one in the gym when officers stood by and watched me getting beaten up 'cause I kicked a ball and it hit someone in the face," he said.
On another occasion, he said he was beaten up outside the youth workers' office.
"The officers there were clearly watching these boys kick me, punch me and bash me. Then they came out and locked me down and those boys just went about their days," he told the commission.
Fred said he made two complaints during his time at Ashley but they went nowhere.
He also said he felt like the staff would sometimes try and "encourage" and provoke fights between detainees.
"On several occasions, I noticed comments were made by staff members like, 'he said this' or, 'this detainee said this about you' and that would cause arguments within the unit and therefore fights," he told the commission.
"You felt like they were doing that just for sport, just to watch."
On top of everything he endured at Ashley, Fred said he also witnessed a lot of brutality occurring to other inmates, including a very violent rape between detainees.
"I saw people get jumped on by three or four officers and kneed in the head," he told the commission.
"I saw a female detainee dragged from the shower naked by her hair and placed on the ground cuffed. I saw so much stuff."
Closing his evidence, Fred urged the commission to "close the place down".
"It's systemic. It's grown in that environment, you won't ever get rid of it by putting in new staff members or changing things," he said.
"Tear the place down; start again. The memories are just appalling."
He said all of Tasmania's detention centres "lack any form of rehabilitation and are punitive".
"Tasmania has the highest rate of recidivism in Australia and I have no doubt that it's due to Ashley and the way we were treated as kids," he said.
"Every single detainee I met in at Ashley [is now] in Risdon. Shut it all down, it's the culture."
'Wait, wait, wait, hold up': Department worker's shock at sorting through claims
In 2003, the state government set up its abuse in state care program to compensate people abused as children.
There were four separate rounds of the program, ending in 2013. In total, it paid about $54.2 million to 1,800 people.
Despite having access to this information for almost two decades, the commission heard it was only in the past two years that the department responsible for managing Ashley decided to collate all four rounds of complaints to work out if they related to any current employees.
Acting executive director of people and culture Jacqueline Allen remembered the moment someone offhandedly mentioned the claims to her.
"It was one of those, 'Wait, wait, wait, hold up. What are you talking about?'" she told the commission.
"We've got all of this information that has been put together, and no action has been taken."
She said up until that point, she had only read a few applications, but as she started to go through them all, it really "painted a picture" of what had occurred at Ashley.
"When you have an excess of 300 applications that have come through detailing ac,ts of abuse, and you can see the same names and the same types of abuse, and you can pick up themes ... it's quite confronting," she said.
"There was too much commonality in some of the methods of abuse … or the allegations for people to have spanned so many different years … some of the themes are just repeated so much that it does definitely cause a lot of concern."
She said while she knew staff were concerned about false allegations and had heard reports about detainees threatening them with allegations, there were too many, and they were too similar to be dismissed.
While a lot of the allegations dated back to when Ashley was a boys' home, they related to current staff.
"It remains a very big disappointment of mine that that work hadn't occurred prior … because I do believe there was definitely valuable intelligence a long time ago in relation to potential perpetrators of child sexual abuse," she said.