Class action lawsuit against Australian youth prison to bring victims AU$75 million – JURIST

The lawyer for former inmates of an Australian youth correctional facility announced in a press release on Friday that the Tasmanian state government intends to pay 75 million Australian dollars to members of a class action lawsuit against the state for abuse.

The class action arose from alleged abuse that occurred at the Ashley Youth Detention Centre in Tasmania since 1960, which children continued to report in 2023. The 2023 Commission of Inquiry into the Tasmanian Government’s response to child sexual abuse in institutional settings details that victims reported sexual abuse including “rape (54 clients), grooming (11 clients), oral rape (nine clients), rape with objects (10 clients), forced sexual acts between children (two clients)” and also “contact abuse”. Physical and psychological abuse was also reported in the form of “isolation” and “beating”.

The Commission’s report states that there have been hundreds of complaints about the circumstances of abuse described above, and yet “it is likely that the Department of Health has known about serious allegations of abuse against current staff at Ashley Youth Detention Centre since at least 2006.” So, until the class action was launched, there was a gap in support for victims of around 16 years since the Government first disclosed this.

The report also provides corroborating detailed accounts of the incidents that happened to inmates at Ashley Detention Centre, although names have been changed for privacy reasons. One former inmate reports that “a staff member sexually assaulted him and two other young people from the centre during an off-site activity. The three boys were not yet teenagers.” Staff then allegedly threatened to “hurt them” if they did not keep the incident secret.

Announcing the settlement, lawyer Angela Sdrinis said the matter was now “in principle” settled and the courts still had to agree on the amount. The aim is to have the matter fully resolved within 12 months, as the court can take up to six months to agree on the payout amount that would still need to be paid to the victims. The $75 million would be split equally among the 129 people involved, which equates to about AU$580,000 per person. The case has been before the courts since 2022.

The subsequent recommendations in response to the scenarios reported at Ashley Youth Detention Centre included a call to “divert” young people from entering the prison system. The report also called on the centre to implement appropriate “qualifications, characteristics and skills” of the staff. And finally, in the event of an abuse case, the “complaints of the victim must be taken seriously and dealt with without retaliation.”