The ABC team obtained the shocking footage through ‘a combination of good fortune and relentless sleuth work’ – and the compelling TV pictures finally forced the Australian government to act

Abuse of teenage prisoners in NT detention: how Four Corners got the story

Within hours of the broadcast of shocking vision on ABC’s Four Corners showing the abuse of Indigenous teenage prisoners, the prime minister had called a royal commission.

One 45-minute program – Australia’s Shame: The Brutalisation of Children Behind Bars – watched by just one million people, had resulted in such decisive action.

At the ABC people were saying “it’s the first time a story has gone to air at dinner time and we’ve had a royal commission by breakfast”.

Northern Territory royal commission: Turnbull urges speed but Labor backs 'full' inquiry Read more

But before the program aired the mistreatment of young people in the Northern Territory juvenile justice system was hardly unheard of.

The ABC’s Kate Wild, for one, has been reporting on the brutality of the NT system for years, including the gassing of children and the use of restraint chairs.

“While people in the Northern Territory have been aware of these stories and these incidents in Don Dale for a long time, seeing the pictures of them last night on Four Corners I know has rocked some people absolutely to the core,” Wild wrote after the broadcast.



Seeing the pictures changes everything. Until Monday night no one outside the system had seen the footage and, as in many cases before, compelling television pictures have the power to move people and force governments to act.



Just this month the New South Wales government banned greyhound racing following another Four Corners expose last year which showed piglets, possums and rabbits being used as live lures by trainers. Similarly in 2011 graphic footage of cattle being inhumanely slaughtered on Four Corners led to the suspension of live trade to Indonesia.



The executive producer of Four Corners, Sally Neighbour, told Guardian Australia the story of Indigenous incarceration was well under way before the team got its hands on the extraordinary pictures.



“We wanted to do a story on Indigenous incarceration but it doesn’t automatically have pictures. It’s happening in remote places that are difficult and expensive to get to and getting people to talk about this subject is difficult,” Neighbour said.



“Our team was looking into that story and then came across the story of Don Dale and we thought it was so horrendous it was worth covering, and it wasn’t until we were well into it that we got the pictures.”



Gold Walkley award-winning reporter Caro Meldrum-Hanna, producer Mary Fallon and researcher Elise Worthington are the three women behind the scoop, which they worked on for two months, including three weeks in the NT.



Neighbour says “a combination of good fortune and relentless sleuth work and determination” saw the footage fall into their hands. The pictures of the boy strapped to a mechanical restraint with a hood covering his head were only secured last week.



“Obviously the pictures were what gave the story such an amazing impact,” Neighbour says.



The story has thrown up a lot of legal issues to do with who was identified and the age of the detainees, and was intensively legalled for several weeks, she said.



Neighbour believes the power of social media propelled the story to have such an extraordinary impact overnight.



“By this morning the Facebook video had five million views and it went off on Twitter,” she said.



Once the ABC had its hands on the CCTV footage showing the restraint and spit-hooding of a boy and other grainy pictures of him being stripped and manhandled by guards, there was no hiding from the reality of the issue.



The power of television gives viewers an insight that simply hearing about an injustice can’t do. Hearing from the victims themselves, their parents and their lawyers, and seeing and hearing evidence of their abuse makes it all too real.



As the editor of New Matilda, Chris Graham, wrote on Tuesday, the images that were broadcast into Australian homes last night of children being tortured in detention were new but the story was not.



Four Corners: I can't see reason, I can only feel anger. And sometimes that's better | Stan Grant Read more

“The most shocking thing about last night’s Four Corners expose … is that anyone is actually shocked,” Graham wrote. “… it took a video of the incident for anyone to actually give a stuff.”



More than 30 years ago now, a similar thing happened when Michael Buerk’s now legendary BBC news story of a “biblical famine” in northern Ethiopia went to air. In an era when the internet and social media were unheard of, Buerk’s powerful report galvanised the world to act.



The pictures of emaciated babies, grieving parents, dead bodies wrapped in cloth and starving people running in the direction of a possible food source, touched the whole world and produced the celebrity response and fundraising that was Live Aid in 1985.



It was said after the impact of the Buerk report that the famine only became newsworthy when the pictures were made available. The same is surely true in this case.

