Reports suggest Wickham Point detention centre is one location under consideration.
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Mr Martin will also look at whether two reports about the abuse at Don Dale in January and August 2015 were sufficiently considered and whether more should have been done by the NT government.
Chief Minister Adam Giles is taking over the portfolio. “It must end now”, said Mr McMillan.
Malcolm Turnbull on Tuesday ordered an inquiry into the treatment of children in detention after the airing of a video showing prison guards teargassing teenage inmates and strapping a half-naked, hooded-boy to a chair.
Mr Elferink told the program he had not seen numerous videos including one where guards were saying “I’ll pulverise the ***er” as a young man in isolation was banging at windows. “We need assurances right now that the abuses revealed on the Four Corners program are not going to be repeated, and can not be repeated”. “I make no excuses for the proposed amendments. Start learning about it.'”, he said at the time.
“The local press has been writing about this for years, courts have been commenting on the inadequacies of the facilities and programs and therapeutic interventions for juveniles in detention and I’ve counted four media releases we’ve issued over 20 months about this issue”.
NT Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw said his security was being reviewed.
The new claim jars with the version of events from the Northern Territory Government, which insists the restraint was only used on Dylan Voller once.
Chief Minister Giles said he was “shocked and disgusted” by the revelations.
“If one of us were to have been found to have treated our children in this way we would probably be charged with a criminal offence and the children would be taken away from us”, said Australia’s Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs, who backed the inquiry.
“I sat and watched the footage and recognized horror through my eyes”, Giles told reporters in Darwin.
The last thing we want is the situation we saw with (the Royal Commission into) Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, where a number of recommendations aren’t even adopted.
Peter O’Brien, a lawyer representing two of the abused boys, said: “The Four Corners programme on the horrific treatment of children has exposed a national disgrace that demands a national inquiry”.
A royal commission into youth detention in the Northern Territory will look at the causes of systemic problems and the failure of officials to identify and correct them.
“They’re being shackled to chairs a la Guantanamo Bay”, barrister John Lawrence told the ABC.
“We’re talking about kids that are being shackled with handcuffs on their ankles, their wrists, their waist areas”.
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Unfortunately, while some people may indeed find it hard to believe that such abhorrent behaviour could take place on Australian shores, there have been plenty of warnings from those involved in the detention system – and not just in the Northern Territory – about the impacts of this country’s climbing rates of incarceration.
