Children’s views on restraint

We asked children and young people in care for their views at a big consultation event we held in the north of England. We invited children from different local authorities across the country, and did not just choose children we already knew or who were already in local participation groups or Children in Care Councils. We asked the children for their views in a series of discussion groups. At the same event, we ran other discussion groups to ask children and young people for their views on two other subjects for our next reports. These were running away, and keeping out of trouble. We also collected responses to all our questions from a group of children at a northern local authority. Altogether we held nine discussion groups on the subject of physical restraint (as well as getting answers from a further group through their local authority). Each group we ran was led by a member of the Office of the Children’s Rights Director, and another member of our team took notes of the views the children gave. Parents, carers, staff members and other adults who had brought children and young people to our discussion groups were not with the children during the discussions, so that the children could freely talk about their views.

We gave children a shopping token to thank them for taking part in our discussions, and they were also able to take part in activities for young people at the activity centre where we held all our nine discussion groups. At that centre, we also set up some electronic screens on which children could enter more views while they were waiting for our groups, or waiting to join activities, or during the lunch break. The answers typed on to those screens have been used in this report, alongside what  was said in our discussion groups and the responses from children in the local authority that gathered their views for us.

As always in children’s discussion groups we run, we asked open questions for discussion, but did not suggest any answers. We told the children and young people that they did not have to agree on any ‘group views’, but could give different views, and disagree without having to argue for their views against anyone else, and we would write down all their different views. We asked many of the same questions that we had asked eight years before, for our 2004 report on restraint, to see whether children’s views and experiences were different now from how they were then.

This report contains, as far as we could note them down, all the views given by the children and young people in the discussion groups, not our own views. We have not added our comments. We have not left out any views we might disagree with, or which the government, councils, professionals or research people might disagree with. Where we have used a direct quote from what a child or young person said, this is either something that summarises well what many had said in a group, or something that was a clear way of putting a different idea from what others had said. As with all our reports of children’s views, we have done our best to write this report so that it can be easily read by young people themselves, by professionals working with young people and by politicians.