UK Commons Committee Urges Gov't To Ban Restraint Methods Used Against Minors In Detention

The UK Parliament's Human Rights Committee has called on the government to ban the use of pain-inducing techniques and solitary confinement of minors in detention after an inquiry showed that children suffered physical distress and psychological harm as a result of these methods

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th April, 2019) The UK Parliament's Human Rights Committee has called on the government to ban the use of pain-inducing techniques and solitary confinement of minors in detention after an inquiry showed that children suffered physical distress and psychological harm as a result of these methods.

According to the committee's report, which was released on Thursday, there are currently around 2,500 children held in the custody of UK institutions, whether for criminal offenses or in hospitals for therapeutic care. The report found that despite the institutions serving different purposes, they all showed a common pattern of abuse against the children.

"The Government must comply with its legal obligations and ensure that children in detention are not subject to solitary confinement or unnecessary or disproportionate uses of restraint," Harriet Harman, chair of the committee, said.

According to the report, common restraint practices in the state institutions included pain-inducing restraint and solitary confinement for the purpose of disciplining the minors. These methods had short-term and long-term detrimental effects to the psychological and physical well-being of the children.

"Our inquiry received unanimous evidence from medics, inspectors, lawyers, and staff who work in detention, that restraint and separation are harmful to children and should be avoided if at all possible .

.. Restraint or separation might seem to solve immediate problems in custody or hospital. But both cause short term and long term harm to children," Harman said.

The committee chair also noted that these pain-inducing techniques made the children's time in detention counterproductive as it reproduced the neglect and abuse the children were meant to be protected from by those same institutions.

The following recommendation were made by the report to remedy the current situation: to ban pain-inducing techniques, to rigorously regulate and monitor all methods of restraint, to create a system of review for all cases of separation, to better-train staff so they can relate to the children.

In addition, the report concluded that not enough was being done by the state institutions to make the children detained there aware of their rights or what to do if they were breached.

The UK government has been under increasing pressure to ban pain-compliance techniques. In February, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, launched in the country in 2014, released a report on the use of restraint against children in custodial institutions. It found 119 incidents of compliance techniques in youth detention centers and called the UK government to outlaw such practices as forms of child abuse.