The prison watchdog has said he was ‘deeply shocked’ after a vulnerable teenage girl was forcibly strip-searched by male officers at a child jail.
Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, also blasted the ‘inappropriate use of pain-inducing techniques’ at Wetherby Young Offenders Institution (YOI) in West Yorkshire.
The institution was holding 165 boys and girls aged 15 to 18, including some of the country’s most ‘challenging’ young offenders, when inspectors visited at the end of last year.
The report, published today, said officers ‘often had to intervene several times a night to remove ligatures’ from girls held at Wetherby.
Mr Taylor said, ‘We were deeply shocked to find adult male officers restraining and stripping an incredibly vulnerable girl not once but twice.
‘While they no doubt acted to prevent serious harm, the presence of multiple men pinning her down and removing her clothes will have caused further trauma and, given how predictable the behaviour of this particular girl was, the YOI has no excuse not to have made sure that female officers were in attendance.’
The chief inspector’s report said, ‘The level of self-harm among girls was extremely high, and this resulted in very high levels of use of force and assaults on staff.
‘There was a high number of pain-inducing restraint techniques and strip-searches under restraint.
‘Many of these incidents were not in accordance with national policy and were not properly authorised.’
It claimed that 24 child strip searches had occurred in the prior year, with half of the kids being restrained.
‘Pain-inducing techniques had been applied nine times in the last 12 months and on every occasion had been deemed inappropriate by the Independent Review of Restraint Panel,’ the report went on.
It found evidence of ‘poor practice’ including one case where officers carried out ‘the restraint of a child, which resulted in an injury that had not been referred to senior leaders’, it said.
In order to stay warm throughout the winter, some kids claimed to have slept in their dayclothes.
According to the study, Wetherby has the capacity to house up to 266 juvenile offenders who have been convicted by a court or who are on remand. Some of these individuals are “the equivalent of high-security prisoners in the adult estate.”
Campbell Robb, chief executive of criminal justice charity Nacro, said: ‘Today’s report from the HM Inspectorate of Prisons into the Wetherby young offenders institution makes for disturbing reading and is another example that putting children in custody should be an absolute last resort.
It seems like these officers had to go in many times a night to remove ligatures, which put them in an extremely challenging situation. But was it preferable for the young people to suffer from self-inflicted pain that might not have been reversible, or from suffering from restraint?
I can’t criticise the officers, but what I can criticise is the poorly managed system that puts them in that position and a vulnerable child in that position.
Female officers should have been present because how would you feel if you were being pinned down by a group of men who were forcibly removing your clothes?
It sounds a bit depraved to me. The kind of treatment you’d expect from other parts of the world. Restrain by all means, but removing clothes should not be tolerated, especially not in the Great Britain that I grew up in.
I’m sure it’s an extremely hard job, but we should all expect some dignity and the same sex person if we are being stripped, it’s a bare minimum really.
If these things are happening, there may not be enough female prison officers, and if male officers are there, then there needs to be female officers present because otherwise, it leaves both parties open to all kinds of issues and accusations.
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