“Children in detention should be treated humanely wherever they are.”

Australian politicians have rushed to condemn the mistreatment of juvenile offenders in the Northern Territory's Don Dale detention centre after the ABC's Four Corners aired footage of teenage boys being sprayed with tear gas while being held in isolation.

ABC Four Corners

Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull swiftly called for a royal commission into the revelations to "get all the facts out" and "expose the cultural problems" that "allowed this type of mistreatment to occur".

But the condemnation of the mistreatment of children doesn't extend to kids being held in Australia's offshore detention centres.

“We have here a very troubling state of affairs where clearly there has been mistreatment of young people," Turnbull said of the Four Corners footage.

Stringer / Reuters

The same could be said of immigration detention. The department of immigration said it had received 15 reports of sexual assault against minors detained on Nauru from 2012 to 2015.

Transfield, the company that ran the Nauru detention centre in 2015, tabled evidence to a senate inquiry into the regional processing centre that showed that there had been 30 cases of child abuse involving staff and 37 involving other detainees.

Paediatrician Dr Karen Zwi told the ABC's 7.30 in February that she had treated a five-year-old boy who was allegedly raped.

"He actually began to self harm," she said. "These kids feel to me like they've been through a mincing machine. They've had one traumatic event after another."

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