PHYSICAL RESTRAINT
Welcome to your weekly blog post. Every week, I share with you my thinking on a residential care, foster care and/or transitioning from care topic. This week I’m talking about the physical restraint of children and young people. If you find this content relevant and useful, please feel free to forward it on to someone else. And my apologies to those of you who tried the registration links for the 3 transitioning from care leveraging global learning webinars that I sent out last Tuesday (NZ time). While the urls were correct there was a problem with the formatting. Details and the registration links for these 3 webinars are available at https://www.betteroutcomes.org.nz/events
According to his mother, Gareth Myatt loved riding his bike, watching South Park and the Simpsons, and playing chess. He was academically able. She says racist bullying in his earlier years contributed to later struggles with his identity. Between the ages of 11 and 14, he was in Out-of-home Care on five separate occasions.
At the age of 15, Gareth was sentenced to custody for breaching a community order, assaulting a member of staff in his children’s home and stealing a bottle of beer. He was admitted to a children’s secure training centre (as distinct from a secure children’s home) which was then run by the international security company G4S. He was admitted on a Friday. On the Monday he was dead.
Gareth had refused to clean a sandwich toaster. A member of staff/officer ordered him to his room/cell, and then started to remove his possessions. When a piece of paper containing his mum’s new mobile phone number was taken, Gareth was said to have raised a fist. Gareth was then held down in the ‘seated double embrace’ restraint position by three members of staff. With echoes of George Floyd in 2020, they did not respond to his cries that he couldn’t breathe; he lost consciousness and was pronounced dead on arrival at hospital. A judge was later to write:
“Among the signs of distress which Gareth manifested during the critical seven minutes were these: he said that he could not breathe; he said that he was losing control of his bowels; he did so; he vomited; finally he slumped motionless. Each of these signs of increasing distress was readily perceptible to the officers”.
Gareth was 4 ‘ 10’’ tall (1m 47 cm). This was in England in 2004; a few months later another English boy Adam Rickwood (14) died at another children’s secure training centre, this time run by SERCO. He was restrained for refusing to go to his room. He was inflicted with a ‘nose distraction’; a prison service restraint technique involving an upward strike to the nose with the intention of causing severe pain. Adam took his own life hours later, leaving a note for his solicitor to say he had asked staff what gave them the right to hit a child on the nose.
However, such deaths have not been limited to England. In 2007 Michael Nunno and colleagues published research in the journal Child Abuse and Neglect entitled Learning from tragedy: A survey of child and adolescent restraint fatalities. Their descriptive study examined 45 child and adolescent fatalities related to restraints in residential placements in the United States from 1993 to 2003.
Since then many jurisdictions that had previously permitted restraint techniques that induced pain have banned such practices, and today there is a much stronger focus on de-escalating incidents, and a choice of international training models.
More recently in Scotland, the residential child care profession* itself, the Centre for Excellence for Children's Care and Protection (CELCIS) through their Scottish Institute of Residential Child Care annual conferences, as well as the Social Work Scotland Residential Childcare Subgroup, are debating what future role, if any, there is for physical restraint in Scotland. Who Care Scotland? the advocacy organisation for children in care have called for physical restraint to be banned, and this is also a recommendation of the 2020 Scottish Independent Care Review. There are some similar discussions going on in some Australian states and New Zealand, but we need more and deeper conversations like this here and elsewhere too.
I’ll finish with some thoughts from Laura Steckley who heads-up Strathclyde’ University’s MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care; Laura has researched and written on this area. She argues that we need to:
recognise that physically restraining children and young people is one of the most complex and contentious areas of practice in residential child care;
better understand the phenomenon, it’s context and the multiple perspectives involved, including those of care experienced children, young people and adults, and front-line residential staff; and
(further) energise efforts, turning them into a collective endeavour to:
reduce and where possible eliminate physical restraint in residential child care establishments; and
where physical restraints do occur, to increase the likelihood that they are (and are experienced as) ‘an act of care rather than brutality’ (SIRCC conference, 2019, 2020).
NOTE: I use the term ‘profession’ in relation to residential child care in Scotland because, like their field social worker colleagues, all Scottish residential child care worker are required to be registered with the Scottish Social Services Council and so have, or be working towards, one or more specified qualifications). However this excludes custody staff at Her Majesty’s Young Offenders Institution Polmont that houses 760 16 to 21 year olds) as part of the adult prison service.
And as ever, thanks again from me for the important work that you do.
Kia kaha (Stay Strong).
Iain
PS – Ready when you are. Here are some ways I can help you:
Check out our website at http://betteroutcomes.org.nz and watch out for the new resources being added over the coming weeks. NEW one page summary of 2015 doctoral research on care leavers, care and education now available.
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Work or partner with us at Better Outcomes on bespoke webinars, masterclasses, training, consultancy, or designing and delivering a research or evaluation project. Contact me at iain@betteroutcomes.org.nz so that we can explore ideas and both decide on whether we are a good fit for each other.