Injustice does not evaporate simply because of the passage of time. And so, today the High Court begins its review of the lawfulness of the Home Office’s failure to implement the majority of the final recommendations of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (‘IICSA’), issued four years ago.
The judicial review is brought by The Maggie Oliver Foundation, a national charity established and chaired by Maggie Oliver, the former detective constable and whistleblower who stood down from her role so she could champion unhindered the rights and dignity of victims and survivors of child sexual exploitation.
Article 39, the charity I founded in 2015 to fight for the rights of children living in institutional settings, is an intervener and, separately, I have provided a detailed witness statement for the claimant, which chronicles attempts by many over the past 20+ years to bring an end to pain-inducing techniques in child prisons.
IICSA described pain-inducing techniques as a form of child abuse. It found them to subjugate children, making them less likely to report sexual abuse. The public inquiry first urged the legal prohibition of these techniques at the conclusion of its standalone investigation into children’s custodial institutions, in 2019. It repeated the same within the 20 recommendations of its final report published in October 2022.
I am thinking today of 14-year-old Adam Rickwood, who took his own life hours after being subject to a pain-inducing technique. A former child in care, Adam was remanded to a child prison run by Serco because there was no place for him in a secure children’s home. Had he been sent to such an establishment, Adam would have been cared for by a multi-disciplinary staff team working to legislation and statutory guidance produced by an arm of government concerned with the welfare of children, the Department for Education, not a branch of the state also operating adult prisons. The use of pain-inducing techniques is prohibited by statutory guidance in secure children’s homes.
Adam left two handwritten notes. One was for his family asking to be buried with his granddad. The other was for his solicitor and gave Adam’s account of the mistreatment he suffered in the guise of restraint. Adam wrote in this letter, “When I calmed down, I asked them why they hit me in the nose and jumped on me. They said it was because I wouldn't go in my room so I said what gives them the right to hit a 14-year-old child in the nose and they said it was restraint”.
At that time the ‘nose distraction’ was one of three Home Office approved techniques for use on children as young as 12 detained in secure training centres. Officers were trained to sharply swipe their hand upwards towards the base of a child’s nose. Adam’s nose bled for around an hour. This authorised technique was suspended in 2007, three years after Adam’s death, and then removed altogether in 2008, though not from all child prisons.
Through a series of freedom of information (‘FOI’) requests, I elicited that it wasn’t until 2010 or 2011 that the ‘nose control’ was withdrawn from young offender institutions (YOI’), where the majority of remanded and convicted children are held. A decade ago, the last government conceded that YOIs cannot be made safe and purposeful for children and pledged to phase them out. This government made a similar commitment earlier this year, with its youth justice White Paper declaring its aim “to move away from large custodial institutions (like Young Offender Institutions) towards smaller, more rehabilitative settings”.
The ‘nose control’ in YOIs was exchanged for the ‘mandibular angle technique’ whereby officers apply pressure behind the base of a child’s ear lobe. This is one of five pain-inducing techniques still used in children’s custodial institutions, the others being ‘wrist flexion’, ‘inverted wrist flexion’, ‘thumb flexion’ and the ‘inverted wrist hold’. While running Article 39 children’s rights charity, I was told in an FOI response in October 2024 that the inverted wrist hold was now officially categorised alongside other pain-inducing methods for use only in emergencies. A national review of pain-inducing techniques had previously elicited the admission from government that “this technique can clearly cause a great deal of pain”. Moreover, in October 2019, I obtained the form that staff must complete after each use of force: this shows the inverted wrist hold is categorised as a pain-inducing technique. But this is not how annually published data represents children’s experiences.
Published statistics for the year ending 31 March 2026 suggest that the number of uses of pain-inducing techniques can be counted on one hand. Yet there were 670 incidents involving techniques which, we are told, may cause pain. It really is an insult to the victims and survivors who gave evidence to IICSA, to children incarcerated today and to child protection as a profession, to maintain the pretence that children are not being systematically and deliberately hurt. And note, these are 670 incidents not total counts of each infliction of pain. Children’s testimony over the past two decades, together with child protection and complaints investigations, especially where CCTV footage has been retained and reviewed, show the distressing truth that many incidents involve repeated pain infliction. Furthermore, inspections and investigations consistently report that pain-inducing techniques have been used to gain compliance rather than to deal with genuine life-threatening emergencies.
The term I have most often read in these official reports is ‘inappropriate’. Having had children directly show and explain to me what it looks and feels like to be on the receiving end of a pain-inducing technique, I’m with IICSA in its choice of words – this is child abuse. This is not hyperbole: I started my career as a child protection social worker knocking on the front doors of parents suspected of abusing children, and I now practise as a barrister in the Family Court. What the state continues to authorise for use on frightened, chaotic and highly distressed children, many of whom have suffered child abuse prior to incarceration, would not be tolerated in any other setting.
As well as hearing evidence of past abuse within these total institutions that graphically showed the interconnectedness of sexual, physical and psychological assaults, IICSA obtained data on contemporary allegations of rape and sexual assault within child prisons – finding 1,070 such allegations for the period 2009 to 2017. In my witness statement supporting The Maggie Oliver Foundation, I set out more recent sexual abuse allegations, investigations and findings. That child sexual abuse continues within custodial institutions should not surprise anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of violence against children. Of course it does: government campaigns against child abuse nail the message that it happens in every setting and with every cohort of children.
A policy change introduced in 2024 seemed to indicate this government had taken action in response to IICSA’s recommendation, with custodial staff now told, “It is never acceptable to deliberately cause pain when a non-painful alternative can safely achieve the same objective”. However, in its update on action to tackle child sexual abuse the following year, the Home Office stated “it is important that trained staff are able to use these techniques, as a last resort in an emergency, to bring an incident to a safe conclusion”. Seemingly we are in Schrödinger territory where the state authorises and trains staff to inflict severe pain on children in prison – a third of whom are disabled and the majority, 65%, having formerly been in care – because it cannot imagine another way, whilst it simultaneously advises staff to use another way whenever possible. The reality is that pain will be inflicted on children for so long as it carries the badge of legitimacy. Read the Hansard debates concerning the removal of corporal punishment in schools and there were those who, to the bitter end, proclaimed there was no alternative. Critically, as parliamentarians pressing for change explained, once school corporal punishment was banned in a country, legislators never sought to reintroduce it.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons’ framework for child prisons requires them not to use pain-compliance, and every possible national and international human rights body has proclaimed the use of pain-inducing techniques on children must end. When the then Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner, Thomas Hammarberg, reviewed children’s custodial institutions, he remarked how odd it was that the UK was so focused on the infliction of pain:
“The Commissioner has been struck by the apparent focus in UK custodial settings on the issue of restraint techniques and what is “allowed” and “not allowed”. He is not aware of any other member state that sanctions the use of deliberate pain as a method of restraining a child.”
What’s more, Scottish adult prisons eschewed pain-inducing techniques several months ago. The Prison Officers Association, which remains inexplicably influential in child protection policy in English child prisons, reports the discovery in Scotland “that we can take control of these situations, every bit as effectively as we used to do with the old control and restraint training”.
Some years after Adam Rickwood’s death, it was the judiciary which gave the principled reply to this child’s desperate question about what gave staff the right to hit him in the nose. In R (Pounder) v HM Coroner for North and South Districts of Durham and Darlington [2009] EWHC 6 (Admin) Blake J at [58] found, “… not only was there no lawful authority to do any of this to Adam but doing this to him was subjecting him to at least degrading treatment contrary to Article 3 ECHR’”. More than two decades after Adam died alone in a prison cell, aged just 14, and four years since IICSA issued its final recommendations, we await the High Court’s judgment for every other child currently held in a custodial institution behind a high fence and far from home, and for those who could be so detained in future.
