Tag: restraint

On fatal and violent restraint: what happens after George Floyd’s murder

Katharine QuarmbyLeave a comment

George Floyd was an African-American man murdered by police during an arrest in May 2020 after a store clerk alleged he had passed a counterfeit $20 bill in Minneapolis. Police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into the back of Mr Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, as the suspect and several bystanders pleaded for his life. Mr Floyd said more than 20 times that he could not breathe and was pronounced dead about an hour after an ambulance arrived. He pleaded for his mother as he lay dying. Chauvin was found guilty of murder yesterday.

George Floyd in 2016 (Wikipedia)

A tragic loss for his family, a kind of justice delivered, a sense that at last police brutality, particularly against people of colour, has been recognised. However, there is something more that we also need to urgently face – the use of sometimes fatal, and always highly traumatic restraint techniques used by police officers, prison guards, healthcare staff and even teachers – internationally. The focus on the US and police brutality is right and proper, but we should also point up that at least on this occasion it was challenged by a court case, and a verdict given. Here in the UK, hardly any such cases get prosecuted and some groups in authority don’t even have to record what they are doing.

The UK has a long and inglorious history of restraining disabled people.

Manacles from the collection at Bethlem Royal Hospital (copyright)

These are iron manacles used in Bethlem Royal Hospital (also known as
Bedlam, one of the world’s oldest hospitals for the treatment of mental
illness) until the Victorian period. They were ostensibly used to help patients from harming themselves. I visited Bedlam, as it was known, during the research for my book Scapegoat: how we are failing disabled people (Portobello, 2011). I remember seeing a display case for the restraints – a gag, manacles, strait waistcoats. I ran into a former patient, Peter Rowbatham, who was exhibiting art work and he told me the place hadn’t been that bad, except when nurses “set us against each other to fight…they got bored. And nobody believes us anyway.”

What Peter said goes to the heart of why so many people get restrained. The wrong kind of people who don’t get listened to, who aren’t believed, whose testimonies can be dismissed as unreliable or untruthful. Would George Floyd’s family ever have received justice if a brave young woman, Darnella Frazier, hadn’t filmed what was happening in front of her, despite fearing what the police officers might do to her, and the trauma of bearing witness?

Here in the UK, we choose all too often not to believe witnesses. Some in authority take advantage of the fact that prisoners aren’t believed, people in mental health units aren’t heard – and disabled children, as I wrote in April for Unherd, are restrained and secluded in schools without any monitoring or need to even tell parents. Actor Sally Phillips told me about her son Olly’s experience: “He was pinned to the grass face down, with his arms behind his back, by a young male teacher wearing blue latex gloves while a small group of other staff looked on. Olly later said that he’d been carried through the school by four staff, one to each limb and thrown.” Model and actor Paris Hilton has also spoken out about her experience in a Utah boarding school and told me: “That small room, covered in scratch marks and smeared blood, with no bathroom, is one of the most vivid and traumatising memories I’ve ever experienced in my entire life.”

Restraint forms part of a sanctioned group of so-called “restrictive practices” used in education, health and social care settings, as well as, unsurprisingly, in prisons. In the UK, these practices are regulated with a duty “to record and report” in all settings except education. Methods include physical restraint (with a number of different holds taught), mechanical restraint (such as being tied to a chair), chemical restraint (using drugs) and the use of seclusion, with children being sent to rooms or even tents and confined within them.

Add to this the emerging practice of imposing “blanket restrictions”, whereby children are not allowed to walk, run or play with their peers, or must visit the toilet at a set time (which is often not appropriate for some disabled children), and it’s no wonder that so many parents of disabled children are terrified for their well-being.

The government, meanwhile, has proudly launched a new behaviour hub, highlighting schools that are, as the government’s behaviour tsar, Tom Bennett, told me, low tolerance for any disruption. He argued that restraint is : “incredibly rare in mainstream schools” and that the rules about restraint are adequate because it is rare, defending the use of “removal rooms and parking students separately from their classes…a common and useful part of many mainstream schools”.

So don’t expect action in England any time soon regarding restraint in schools although at least its use is monitored in other settings such as secure children’s homes, mental health units, even if it remains over-used. However, in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland parents whose children have been restrained are agitating successfully for change. England is lagging behind.

What’s behind our need for restraint? Of course sometimes people in distress need to be held, and sometimes people may need to be prevented from harming themselves or others. Everyone accepts that. But the overuse of restraint (and seclusion) in the UK and the US suggests something more disturbing, that it is the overt exercise of power over someone who is at that moment more vulnerable than the person restraining and that it can go wrong, without any consequences for the person who has restrained another human being. As the sociologist Ervin Goffman laid out so cogently in his analysis of what he called total institutions, where a group of people (prisoners, patients etc) could be bureaucratically controlled, unequal power relationships are justified by the needs of the institution. The institution serves itself, rather than serving those it ‘treats’ (and of course the institution can be the police, just as well as it can be a school or mental health unit). We need to be vigilant of all those situations where children and adults can be subjected to unequal power relationships and make those in power accountable to the rest of us. If it hadn’t been for Darnella Frazier it is possible that the police would never have been accountable. But a bigger question looms – what about all those people who are harmed – and even die – of restraint techniques where there are no brave witnesses or cameras to show what really goes on when the powerful abuse their positions?

Why are we restraining and secluding so many disabled children?

Katharine Quarmby1 Comment

In March this year (2021) the Equality and Human Rights Commission is expected to release the findings of a long-awaited inquiry into the use of what are called restrictive interventions in schools. Paused due to Covid, it will doubtless show the widespread use of disturbing techniques, including restraint that harms, isolation booths and other forms of enforced isolation. It will also show patchy information about the use of the techniques, as schools are not under any duty to record those interventions – even when they harm a child. I have been investigating the use of these interventions for over a year, talking regularly to campaigners, lawyers and regulators – and have done some freedom of information requests in schools as well – of which more later. This is another shocking example of how we are failing disabled people.

Disabled children are the most likely to experience these interventions. There are many aspects to restrictive interventions that are disturbing, but one particularly harrowing finding is that children as young as three have been subjected to them. The lives of disabled children matter as much as the lives of non-disabled children and the UK has long led the way in calling for the inclusion of disabled children in mainstream education. But factors including underfunding and poor training of teachers in knowing how to support disabled children at moments when they find school difficult may have contributed to frequent separation of children with special needs from their non-disabled class mates. This de facto segregation starts early, and means that disabled children’s experience of education diverges early from other children – even in what appears to be a mainstream setting. This leads to a parallel life for disabled children in which many are traumatised by their experience of education. At transition, when children become young adults, oftentimes they then experience a crisis – and end up in other institutions, such as assessment and treatment units (ATUs). They then get restrained and secluded again. I’ve written about the awful state of our ATUs previously.

That journey of harm starts in school – so what can we do about it? As I said, I submitted FOIs to schools across England before the outbreak of Covid-19 to find out more about monitoring, reporting and incidence. I am not going to release those results in full as they are already out of date. Schools won’t be the same after the end of lockdown. But what was clear from the FOIs was that few schools monitor their use of restrictive interventions, many do not report their use to parents or carers and incidence varies widely across schools. Different practices are also in play, depending on the training that schools receive from external providers. Some children have ended up with horrific injuries, including broken limbs and severe trauma. One child had their vision impaired as a result of restraint. Many end up with mental health impacts that then, as I said, may lead them to moments of crisis later in their lives – so that they end up experiencing similar restrictive interventions in ATUs, secure children homes, prison or mental health settings.

It’s time that a light was shone on the use of these practices in schools – and schools need to monitor them properly, report them in detail to parents and carers and be aware that these are hugely traumatic to experience. Of course teaching staff must also be protected from harm, but there are other ways of managing behaviour that don’t cause physical and mental harm.

Beth Morrison, who has campaigned to highlight the damage done by such techniques in schools, is in many ways responsible for the EHRC kick-starting this inquiry. Disabled children and their parents owe her a debt of thanks for her work. Other key figures include Nick Hobbs and the Children’s Commissioner for Scotland, Bruce Adamson and other parent campaigners including Deirdre Shakespeare and Elly Chapple. All of the parents have fought for the harm done to their children by restraint to be recognised and also for others affected. This has been a parent led campaign to reveal harm and create change – I hope the EHRC will honour their involvement and transform educational practice in this area for the next generation of children.

For me, as a writer and journalist who has investigated human rights abuses for many years, this investigation has opened my eyes into the rights of disabled children. I offered work on this important topic to most mainstream newspapers. Few of them replied and none of them thought it was news-worthy enough to make space for on the news pages. It doesn’t matter who suffered as a result of these interventions – even when Paris Hilton has spoken out about her experience and campaigned to highlight the issue it receives very little focus. It says a lot about how the media thinks of disability – and disabled children in particular – that this subject has received so little media attention.