There was no great surprise that the right would go after Dylan Voller, the teenager featured in the Four Corners expose of the Don Dale detention centre. They’re sycophants to power, after all, and bullies to boot, otherwise they wouldn’t work, as most of them do, for News Corp, which regards bullying as a standard journalistic method. Psychologically, many would identify with the Don Dale guards, not only racially, but in terms of their power position — and the criticism they’re now getting.
Ever since the Four Corners Don Dale episode aired, the right have been in hysteria about it. It prompted Bill Leak’s cartoon (“righto, what’s his name then?”), which, through its visual rhetoric and rendering, portrayed every Aboriginal father as a dysfunctional adult, and the rest of the rat pack have been dying to have a go at Voller ever since. The more shocking the visuals — Voller, hooded, in a restraint chair — coupled with the unavoidable facts of institutional malaise running to sadism, the more desperate has been the effort to block out the news.
The effort put into this is in direct proportion to the nature of the report and the incidents themselves. This isn’t the sort of grey area stuff we have to deal with in northern affairs these days — education, housing and health policy, tackling difficult and multidimensional problems. Instead, a decaying, unsupervised, out-of-control penal system was caught on camera. It’s because the thing is so unarguable that it must be argued with. If that is let through, if some admission of institutional oppression is made, then what else must be admitted?
In the process, Voller must be made the focus of the attack. Institutionalised since the age of 10, with the vast majority of the assaults he is accused of occurring in that context, a user of “ice” when he is outside, Voller offers the right the opportunity to repudiate any form of social explanation for behaviour whatsoever, on the spurious grounds that it amounts to some denial of the importance of taking responsibility.
It doesn’t, but responsibility, impulse resistance, etc, is, for someone 10 years old and up, a learned behaviour, and one that can only be learned in contexts where taking responsibility makes a difference in your life. The characteristics of institutions such as Don Dale is that they propagate “learned helplessness” — the gradual understanding that no action on your part will make any difference to the outcome of matters for you. Such contexts produce resistant behaviour as a way of affirming self.
What else can you do when submerged by an institution but to re-establish your own existence and avoid the implicit logic of the institution, which is towards suicide? Voller, who requested permission to study in prison, was refused and has been repeatedly victimised by guards, is being punished and hated precisely because he is trying to be a human being. He is being punished, in part, for not having the good manners to off himself at an earlier time.
The right’s fury against Voller is redoubled by the fact that he is calm, articulate and persuasive on the witness stand, capable of giving an account of his situation, in terms of the institution itself, rather than in a cry of rage or self-pity. This is doubly verboten, since the argument is that Voller is being presented as a victim in the age of victimhood. But this argument works only when people who aren’t victims take on the status for its burst of meaning. Voller actually is a victim — but he also refuses to behave like one, when given a chance not to.
The damning of Dylan Voller has a wider agenda, of course. It’s part of a longer process of the right to create the idea of a surplus population, to suggest that the excluded have, en masse, brought their exclusion and oppression on themselves. The effort involves a reintroduction of the “Christian” notion of “wickedness”, that someone like Voller is rotten from the root, rather than being produced — in his current incarnation — by the institutionalisation process.
The idea of wickedness allows you to dismiss whole groups of people, and see social success, implicitly or explicitly, as a self-selecting group. With that in place, you can celebrate your own good luck, reject any and all systematic sociological thinking or reflection, demands that institutionalised teenagers be judged by the same measure as public citizens, and be relieved of any guilt or curiosity about how a ten, or eight, or six year old, can be taken from childhood to a violent, resistance adolescence in a matter of years.
The circumstances that produced someone like Dylan Voller, in his most resistant phase, are those of an underinvestment in society — in rural society, in northern society, together with a degree of less treatable problems to do with the centralisation of society, the collapse of the viability of regional and peripheral social life. That doesn’t mean ignoring violent behaviour, or that some adolescents might need to be in secure units. But the sadistic treatment of Voller followed by its justification has an agenda beyond this case. The right, in their pursuit of populist power, will sort the populi into the saved and the damned. For the latter, a restraint chair and a spit hood is the least they can expect.
This is a good illustration of the sort of white privilege I enjoyed, but is not available to someone like Dylan Voller. I went through a “teenage delinquent” phase. I won’t detail what that involved, the list is very long and includes such pleasantries as vandalism, theft, burglaries, etc. I was a mini-crime spree. I’m not proud of this and I am very glad that I grew out if it. But on the rare occasions when I did get caught, I ended up with a slap on the wrist. I’m certain that if I had been an aboriginal kid (or Somali, Lebanese, Tongan, take your pick) I would have ended up in institutions like Don Dale. I am even more certain that if that had been the case I’d never have been able to turn my life around like I have and not just become very successful but so stupidly law-abiding that I even go out of my way to make sure I don’t cheat on my taxes.
I was shocked at “The Australian” article on Dylan Voller. I know that I should not have been after all – what can we expect? But honestly how is it possible that the national newspaper considers a teenage aboriginal boy, fair game for their agenda of discrediting any and all proponents or victims of human rights abuse in this country.
For pity’s sake the boy has been brutally treated- the photos and the evidence prove it. No one, absolutely no human no matter what he has done, deserves or should be subject to such cruelty at the hands of the state. Even Mundine, an aboriginal leader did not stand up for this boy.
Can these people not see the lack of proportionality in the treatment of the boy? Would any of them defend a child of theirs treated so?
What sort of barbarian nation are we? A nation begun under the lash, shackles and prison as a convict nation, now using same techniques with modern variations on Aboriginal kids and people seeking asylum. Have no doubt what Dylan Voller described was and is used in immigration detention centres. Isolation cells, handcuffing and shackling, “take downs”- euphemism for violence, use of airconditioning to freeze people are all technique in current use by Border Force. This validates what Dylan Voller described and what the cameras showed. In fact a man in the Christmas Island detention camp said ” I saw on the TV what they did to those kids in Don Dale- they do same to us in ‘take down’ when ERT smash our face into floor, put knee in back and other knee on face”
The culture of brutal institutional violence is alive and well in our many prisons and detention institutions.
A perfectly well behaved young lad, impeccably dressed, articulate and presentable. Committed to an institution for no reason other than persecution by authorities, where he was singled out for torture, again, for no reason.
So John, are you saying it’s ok to be singled out for torture in the youth justice detention system if you have a reason?
Voller shouldn’t worry. Let’s face it, the Right hates anyone who dares criticise or question their infallibility, as much as they do someone who casts their administrations in a negative light, even when they’re symptoms/collateral damage to a corrupt system?
Especially when it comes to their sort of lore and ordure.
Leigh Sales on the 7.30 Report a few days had the gall to question the lad’s integrity and whether his statements could be believed!
What. The. F**k!
The ABC has gone steadily down hill particularly with newscaff shows like 7.30pm under this odious presenter. This beggers belief after the breathtaking and shocking footage and activities uncovered by their (smarter) cousins 4C wrt Don Dale.
Sales should just leave and join the Far Right in the guise of Sky News or become a female version of Alan Jones, Neil Mitchell and all those other RWNJ on radio.