On Monday night A Current Affair launched a guerrilla attack on the refugees Australia has resettled on Nauru.

The ACA team were the first TV crew to make a sanctioned visit to the island since it effectively sealed its borders to journalists in 2014.

Given the chance to report from Nauru, where refugees have been brutalised under Australia’s stewardship, ACA chose to focus on the more superficial problems of life on Nauru – a thrown pencil in a classroom, stolen bikes and vaguely described health issues. In doing so, it made the refugees’ universal desire to leave the island appear similarly superficial.

“Many average Australians would have watched the story last night and wondered what all the complaining was about: on the whole, the refugees on Nauru are well-fed, most live in relative comfort and they’re free to move around as they please,” wrote ACA’s Caroline Marcus in the Daily Telegraph.

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But poor living conditions and restrictions on movement are not what refugees fear. Their physical and mental safety is the most significant story embroiling Australia’s Nauruan detention regime. Marcus’s report reduced this to a parenthetic “there have been reports of sexual assaults”.

Stories of fear and abuse are not difficult to find on Nauru. On Christmas night in 2014, after slipping past a sleeping guard into two refugee camps, a photographer and I sat with refugees as they told us their stories. Speaking in hushed voices, a group of Somali women told us that they had begged Australian immigration officials to be placed back into detention to remove them from the attentions of men who knocked on their windows at night. They said they slept wearing jeans. Several reported being attacked.

The refugee community is small and has become tight-knit against adversity. They know when one of their friends has been hurt. Once word spread that a journalist was on Nauru, meetings were easy to arrange.

Most interviewees feared retribution from the Nauruan government, locals or the Australian immigration department, so they would only speak and be photographed anonymously. Thus it is unsurprising that none of these women were willing to speak to ACA on camera. It is standard journalistic practice to protect the identity of victims of abuse. Whether Marcus offered them the opportunity to speak anonymously is unclear.

Three months after my visit, the Moss review would crystallise the rumours of rape and abuse in Nauru’s detention centres. This year, a report documented the ongoing abuse of unmarried women like those we met, who live among the Nauruan community. On Monday, the Guardian revealed the mind-numbing frequency of self-harm recorded in the logs of the private security firm guarding the centres.

When given the rare opportunity to interview the Nauruan president, Baron Waqa, ACA failed to ask – or failed to air – questions about the safety of the refugees.

“Is it dangerous?” Marcus asked the country’s justice minister, David Adeang. No, he said, Nauru’s rates of violent crime are lower than Australia’s. There was no follow up.

Instead, the camera lingered reproachfully on a flatscreen TV and a new undercover playground provided to refugees by the Australian government. There were also casual questions about the money refugees paid to traffickers. In this context this information was only relevant to fuel the trope that these are economic migrants who can’t be that hard up if they can afford thousands for a boat trip to Australia.

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ACA’s report sought to set the facts straight on the most facile criticisms of Australia’s Nauruan regime. Refugees’ daily protests photographed through the wire of the detention centre were revealed to be staged beside an open gate. Refugees on Nauru are fighting an asymmetric media war against the Australian government. Their unalloyed condemnation of every aspect of life in Nauru is not subtle.

Neither is the rhetoric of some of their advocates. The program started with footage of the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young calling the island a “hellhole”. This type of hyperbole is offensive to the Nauruan people and easy for ACA to repudiate. It might be expected that an Australian politician speaks with more restraint. Nauru is not Auschwitz.

But the refugees are people devoid of hope and left only with anger. Women and children have been raped without consequence. Do we really expect them to caveat their complaints with thanks for giving them a TV?