CHILDREN locked up in the UK are subjected to horrific pain, inhuman and degrading treatment, cruel restraining techniques and solitary confinement, a damning report released by a parliamentary committee has highlighted. And these methods are all legal and condoned by the government!
The UK Parliament’s Human Rights Committee found that: ‘Staff in Youth Offender Institutions (YOIs), but in no other children’s institutions, can deliberately inflict pain on child inmates.’
The Committee points the finger of blame directly at the government and demands that deliberately inflicting pain on children must stop. It states: ‘(The) government must comply with international law and end the use of pain-inducing restraint techniques and the solitary confinement of children in detention.’
The Committee examined the use of restraint and separation in a range of settings where 2,500 children are detained at any one time.
It concluded that the most dangerous form of restraint is called ‘prone’ and is when the child’s face is pressed to the floor while their arms are forced behind their back.
There is a real risk that face down, or prone, restraint can result in a dangerous compression of the chest and airways and put the child at risk of suffocation.
Human Rights Committee Chair Harriet Harman MP said: ‘Restraint can be painful, cause injuries, be distressing at the time and cause long-term psychological harm. In some contexts the use of these techniques can amount to inhumane and degrading treatment and should be banned.’
This is the way that the British state treats children who are in youth detention centres! This is in complete contrast to the British state’s treatment of the Extinction Rebellion protests. The police have dealt with them using kid gloves.
For the last four days, protesters have been allowed to block bridges across the Thames, block traffic in key parts of central London, shut down traffic in Parliament Square, Oxford Circus and Marble Arch.
Yesterday, while the protesters blocked Waterloo Bridge, police were simply patrolling and ‘monitoring the situation’. The Met said in a statement: ‘These are peaceful protesters; while disruptive, their actions are not violent towards police, themselves or other members of the public.’
Those that have been arrested are taken to a police station and then released to re-join the protest. They are in the main from the middle class, and some are the sons and daughters of the ruling class.
Their message is, as they stop the traffic and glue themselves to trains, that the masses of the people with their air travel and cheap holidays and massive expectations are spoiling their world. Their battle cry is that the ordinary people must be confronted and told that for the good of their planet, their lives must change for the worse.
The police know better than to handle the middle and upper classes roughly. This would definitely not be the case if it was the RMT train drivers who were blocking traffic in central London and blockading bridges over the Thames to demand rail safety and that guards must stay on trains. Overnight the Met would become the French CRS!
The Extinction Rebellion protesters are not deemed a threat to the capitalist state. It is the rising anger amongst the working class and youth that the capitalist class fears.
Meanwhile, large numbers of young people are having pain inflicted on them by permission of the UK capitalist government. It is truly one law for the rich and another for the working class and the poor.
In fact, what the British capitalist state is preparing for with its playful attitude to middle and upper class climate protestors, at the same time as it savages young children in state institutions, is for a situation where the Tory party collapses and Labour comes into office with millions of workers and youth demanding, not just that austerity be ended, but that the brutal capitalist state is broken up and replaced with a workers state through a socialist revolution.
Then the paras, who recently had Corbyn in their sights, will be let loose on the people. There is only one way forward. Join the WRP and the YS and organise a general strike and a socialist revolution to smash capitalism, and end the exploitation of the working class and the planet by the ruling class for ever!
