Britain has a long, pernicious history of brutalising working class children confined to state institutions, so it was hardly surprising when an amendment to the rules governing ‘secure training centres’ was introduced, widening the use of so-called ‘physical control in care restraint techniques’, one of which authorised staff to inflict blows to children’s faces, euphemistically called the ‘nose distraction technique’. A recent legal challenge was partially successful in that the court found the rules were amended on the basis of ‘flawed and unlawful decision making’; however it did not agree to quash them.
The use of overt physical violence to control socially marginalised children is nothing new and for decades Borstals and Detention Centres operated regimes designed to teach a ‘tough lesson’ based on fear and intimidation. The death of a child in the Reading Detention Centre in the late 1960s partially exposed the regime of terror, although the state was careful to maintain the illusion that it neither sanctioned nor created the violence. More recently the extraordinarily high incidence of suicides, self-harm and suspicious deaths in Feltham Young Offenders Institute suggest that intimidation and brutality remain standard.
Thirty children have died in custody since 1990; the youngest, Adam Rickwood, was just 14. Over a third of boys and girls in custody have felt unsafe at some time; one in ten say they have been hit, kicked or assaulted by a member of staff.
Traditionally the state has never publicly admitted to deliberate violence in subduing ‘disruptive’ children, which is why the statute authorising overt brutality was so disquieting and shocking. More liberal elements in government, in the form of the Parliamentary Joint Committee On Human Rights, announced a review of such ‘restraint’ methods. Subsequently children’s minister Beverley Hughes announced that she was suspending the methods pending a report by a panel of medical experts. Her concern was obviously not based on moral reservations, but simply possible legal consequences.
In October 2007 the Prison Officers Association offered its own enlightened contribution by calling for a change in the rules to allow prison staff to use batons on children as young as 15.
The psychological damage to children in custody is well-researched; 85% of young prisoners show signs of personality disorder, with 10% exhibiting signs of severe psychotic illness such as schizophrenia. Into this mix of mental suffering and pain the state wants to throw some good old-fashioned physical brutality. This is systemic child abuse and thousands of working class children are irreparably damaged by it.
Usually keen to whip up hysteria and hatred against child abusers when campaigning for tougher laws, the media have remained consistently quiet about the abuse of children in closed institutions. The number of 15-17 year-olds in prison custody has increased by 86% since Labour took office. Each year over 70,000 children are dealt with through the criminal justice system and around 12,000 incarcerated in institutions that are no more than training grounds for the adult prison system.
This represents the wholesale destruction of young working class lives in the interests of a system that is itself inherently anti-social and predatory towards the poor and powerless. The imprisonment of children is barbaric and one of the worst forms of state cruelty, and unless we campaign against it we are all in some way complicit.
John Bowden,
Noranside Prison. Scotland
FRFI 202 April 2008/May 2008
