End the barbarism of physical restraint

To weaken the provisions in local communities and then to claim that building the new secure training centres will help to prevent juvenile crime is a sham – Tony Blair in 1994 criticising the then Home Secretary, Michael Howard’s proposals for STCs. The first STC was opened under NL in 1998.

This is the reality of private companies running prisons for young people. This is the grim reality of marketisation and privatisation of justice….

Shocking details of techniques used to inflict pain deliberately on children in privately run jails have been revealed for the first time in a government document obtained by the Observer.

Some of the restraint and self-defence measures approved by the Ministry of Justice include ramming knuckles into ribs and raking shoes down the shins. Other extraordinary passages in the previously secret manual, Physical Control in Care, authorise staff to:

■ “Use an inverted knuckle into the trainee’s sternum and drive inward and upward.”

■ “Continue to carry alternate elbow strikes to the young person’s ribs until a release is achieved.”

■ “Drive straight fingers into the young person’s face, and then quickly drive the straightened fingers of the same hand downwards into the young person’s groin area.”

Furthermore

The campaign for publication began following the deaths of Gareth Myatt and Adam Rickwood. Myatt, 15, died while being held down by three staff at Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre in Warwickshire. Myatt choked on his own vomit and died.

In the same year, 2004, 14-year-old Rickwood, from Burnley, hanged himself at the Hassockfield Secure Training Centre in County Durham. A judge ruled last year that the carers who restrained Rickwood shortly before his death had used unlawful force.

His mother, Carol Pounder, was said to be “relieved” that other parents would now know the truth behind the use of restraint.

It has taken 5 years to get public disclosure regarding this manual of brutal violence, restraining “unruly children”. Oh, and the government were actually prepared to fight this disclosure as well.

More grim reality of the private sector, During the 12 months up to March 2009, restraint was used 1,776 times in the UK’s four secure training centres.

Back in 2008, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights have argued that physical techniques involving “deliberate physical pain should be banned without delay”.. The Court of Appeal in July 2008 held that the rules currently in force allowing children in custody to be restrained for reasons of “good order and discipline” were unlawful.

The spin used by these private contractors, for example G4S,  includes that their policies are “derived from the principles of childcare best practice and reflect the every child matters agenda”. Well, did those principles include creating a macho enviroment where staff were given nicknames like “mauler”, “crusher” and “clubber”? Where children and young people who had been restrained the most times being described as “winners”? And Gareth Myatt who died in the care of Rainsbrook after losing consciousness while being restrained by 3 members of staff. Are these the policies that reflect “every child matters”? Did Gareth Myatt’s life matter?

Many of these children and young people come to these places damaged, distressed and in a highly vulnerable state (Adam Rickwood was suicidal but it was ignored). They are subjected to abuse and violence once in these places. What kind of person will come out of the other side..?

Physical restraint is used as a punishment against children and teenagers. The whole ethos of containment lacks compassion and understanding. These young people are sometimes miles away from any support structure, their human rights breached.

Serco, (hope you are reading this Polly Toynbee) runs Hassockfield where Adam Rickwood died. Serco has its greedy grasping fingers in many corporate pies (and doing very well with profits increasing) from decommissioning Sellafield to running racist Yarl’s Wood Immigration Remand Centre. Serco makes its money from misery, oppression and violence.

Rather like the numbers of adult deaths in state custody that go unheard, ignored and reduced to statistics, the number of children who have died in custody in the last 17 years is 29. Young, vulnerable and powerless people whose lives end in these hellholes. The continued use of physical restraint shows how immune to criticism & opposition the state is to the UN, the Council of Europe, the parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights and the Children’s Commissioner for England nor the Court of Appeal.

Physical restraint is state sanctioned torture and violence against powerless and vulnerable young people, there should be a public inquiry into the way children are treated in custody (as argued by INQUEST) and physical restraint should be banned! Human rights and the safeguarding of young people while they are in ‘care’ aren’t seen as paramount to their wellbeing. Nothing, it seems, has been learned from the senseless, pointless and tragic deaths of Adam Rickwood and Gareth Myatt.

And finally this from Malcolm Stevens, a former government policy adviser and director of secure training centres who helped to develop the government’s guidance for staff working in secure centres during the 1990s, said he could not understand why pain-inducing techniques were endorsed. He said: “I have never seen the need to use pain-compliant techniques, and after 15 years my view has not changed. I have no truck with distraction techniques.”

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