Wetherby Young Offender Institution holds some of the most complex and vulnerable young prisoners, inspectors say.
By Callum May & Sean Seddon
BBC News
A vulnerable girl in a young offenders institution twice had her clothes removed under restraint by an all-male team of prison officers, a report says.
The inmate had been stripped to stop her using her clothes to harm herself at Wetherby Young Offender Institution.
The incident emerged in a report highly critical of the facility, which houses some of the UK’s most complex children.
Its author Charlie Taylor said care for vulnerable young people – especially girls – was “not good enough”.
The chief inspector of prisons told the BBC it costs nearly £250,000 a year to keep a child at Wetherby, adding: “With outcomes like this, there has to be a real question over whether this is working.”
Inmates at Wetherby are between 15 and 18 and almost half have been in the care system during their lives. Some are beginning very long or life sentences.
There are seven girls imprisoned in England and Wales. When Wetherby was inspected in late 2023, three were held there – a small fraction of the institution’s 165 inmates.
Wetherby saw almost 900 incidents of self-harm in the space of a year – the highest of any prison in England and Wales – and more than half were accounted for by the three girls.
The report found the “extremely high” levels of self-harm had led to “very high” levels of use of force and assaults on staff.
Some child inmates had very little time out of their cell, particularly at weekends, the report said
It singled out the treatment of one particular girl who was using her clothes to make ligatures and was twice pinned down and forcibly stripped by male prison staff.
Female staff did not attend the searches because they had been assaulted earlier in their shift.
Mr Taylor said the girl’s “predictable” pattern of self-harm meant there was no excuse not to have female staff on hand, adding: “The fact it happened twice is completely unacceptable.”
He painted a damning picture of how girls are managed by the prison system, particularly at Wetherby, after warning in his report there is no “coherent plan” about how they should be held.
Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme she did not think the treatment received by the girl at Wetherby was an isolated incident.
“Although hopefully most of the YOIs [Young Offender Institutions] normally have female staff on, I don’t think this is a complete one-off,” she said.
“This case should be the line in the sand where these girls are much better served by being in mental health wards or in secure children’s homes,” said Dame de Souza.
She said she had written to Justice Secretary Alex Chalk and to the inspectorate to say “we really need to get girls out of these institutions.”
Asked whether they were suitable for young men, Dame de Souza said: “What most of the boys say to me is, ‘I come in here and I learn how to be a criminal’.”
- If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this story you can visit BBC Action Line.
‘High levels of violence’
The Wetherby report found children held there spent too much time locked in their cells, received a poor standard of teaching and were subjected to a high rate of “pain-inducing restraint techniques”.
Twenty four children were strip-searched over 12 months – half of which were carried out forcibly.
Pain-inducing techniques were used nine times over the same period and not a single incident was deemed appropriate by an independent review panel.
Inspectors reviewed randomly selected bodycam footage and identified an incident where a child had been injured while being restrained and senior leaders had not been told, the report revealed.
Image source, HMI Prisons
Some young inmates at Wetherby are allowed to use a sensory room
Mr Taylor credited the governor with making Wetherby more stable in recent years and most children there described having a good relationship with staff.
However, the report concluded its safety score had to be downgraded, particularly because of its care for girls.
It described the insistence from leaders at Wetherby that they lack sufficient frontline managers to make progress on some key issues as “scarcely credible” given it had 91 members of staff in senior positions.
Mr Taylor told the BBC young offender institutions are too “top heavy”, with high numbers of middle-managers and”frontline officers on the ground… leaving because of high levels of violence”.
He said “there is no doubt these are difficult places to work” and called for “real thinking” on how to reduce violence in order to make youth justice more stable and sustainable.
The report has prompted calls for reform of youth justice in England and Wales.
Andrea Coomber, of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “It is virtually impossible to imagine the damage caused to the girl who, made to live in a prison designed for boys, became so distressed to the point of wanting to harm herself and was then forcibly stripped by a group of men not once but twice.
“It is appalling that the state’s care for vulnerable children could sink to such depths.”
Campbell Robb, chief executive of the charity Nacro, said: “A group of men forcibly stripping a distressed young girl, hurting and locking away children in cold cells is not how any child should be treated in a civilised society, whatever they have done in the past.
“The government must act immediately to improve the lives of these children and to lay out a comprehensive improvement plan across all of these institutions.”
A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said custody should be the last resort for children who commit crime and the number of girls in youth custody had decreased since 2015.
“This small number of girls have exceptionally complex needs and require specialised support, which is why HMYOI Wetherby is providing additional training to staff on self-harm and increasing opportunities for meaningful activity, education and personal development,” she said.
“Restraint is only used on children in rare circumstances when there is no alternative to prevent serious harm to the child, other children or staff.”
