Pain-inducing restraints to be banned in England and Wales children’s prisons

Staff working in children’s prisons are to be banned from using techniques that deliberately cause pain, except in emergency scenarios to save life or to prevent life-changing injury.

The new Ministry of Justice policy for England and Wales, which follows a review completed by the now chief inspector of prisons, Charlie Taylor, in 2020, will be effective from February 2024. It states that it is “never acceptable to deliberately cause pain when a non-painful alternative can safely achieve the same objective”.

In his review Taylor criticised the restraint regime (known as MMPR – minimising and managing physical restraint), saying: “I believe that this places the use of pain-inducing techniques on a spectrum that makes it an acceptable and normal response rather than what [it] should be, the absolute exception.” Taylor said MMPR “has contributed to the overuse of these techniques that I so frequently witnessed during this review”.

Three official methods of pain-inducing restraint are still in use in children’s prisons, involving the infliction of severe pain to the area below a child’s ear (“mandibular angle technique”), thumb (“thumb flexion”) and wrist (“wrist flexion”). But the MoJ has conceded that a fourth technique (“inverted wrist hold”) causes “considerable pain and discomfort” and agreed to recategorise it after Taylor’s review concluded that it had “become a pain-inducing technique in all but name”.

Staff will only be allowed to use techniques that deliberately cause pain when they are responding to a situation where someone’s life is threatened “or there is risk that they will suffer a significant or life changing injury”. The policy document states that any time an “emergency intervention technique” is used it must be reported to the Youth Custody Service and that staff “will be expected to be fully accountable for the action taken”.

The policy will be implemented 20 years after 14-year-old Adam Rickwood killed himself at Hassockfield secure training centre in County Durham following a restraint by four Serco officers for non-compliance using a technique called “nose distraction”, which involved a karate-like chop to the nose. Rickwood left a note behind asking “what gives them the right to hit a 14-year-old child in the nose?” Six hours after the restraint he hanged himself.

The “nose distraction” technique was suspended three years after Rickwood’s death and finally withdrawn in 2008. At a second inquest into his death in 2011 it was ruled unlawful. But officers in children’s prisons have continued to be authorised and trained in the use of pain-inducing techniques despite condemnation from Council of Europe and UN anti-torture bodies and the UK’s children’s commissioners.

In 2016, the Guardian revealed that a report commissioned by the MoJ found some authorised restraint techniques could kill children or leave them disabled. An internal risk assessment of restraint techniques, seen by the Guardian, showed that certain procedures approved for use against non-compliant children carried a 40-60% chance of causing injuries involving the child’s airway, breathing or circulation, the consequences of which could be “catastrophic”.

In 2019, the Guardian reported that children were still being restrained unlawfully at Medway secure training centre for “passive non-compliance” and officers were deliberately using techniques to inflict pain on them. This was despite a Panorama documentary three years earlier exposing staff at the centre, then run by the security company G4S, abusing children and boasting about using restraint as a cover for their mistreatment.

The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse said in 2019 that pain-inducing techniques were a form of child abuse that must be prohibited by law. It repeated this recommendation in its final report issued last October.

The Ministry of Justice launched the review of the use of pain-inducing restraint across all child prisons and escorting procedures after the children’s charity Article 39 applied for judicial review in 2018. This followed the discovery that escort officers had been empowered to inflict pain on children during their journeys to secure children’s homes despite such treatment being banned within the local authority-run establishments themselves. Article 39 also obtained an assurance from the government that restraint would not be used by escort officers to make children follow orders.

The four pain-inducing techniques currently authorised in children’s prisons were used in 1,258 separate incidents last year. The inverted wrist hold is the most commonly used to inflict pain – accounting for 97% of incidents involving deliberate pain in 2022-23, according to freedom of information data provided to Article 39.

Carolyne Willow, Article 39’s director, said: “Had ministers and the prison establishment listened properly to children nearly 20 years ago, and drawn a line in the sand after Adam’s preventable death, this policy change would not have dragged on to 2024. We will continue to closely monitor and hold government and institutions to account, since this is an area of policy replete with broken promises and catastrophic child protection failures.”

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or by emailing jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org