Voice for the vulnerable: Carolyne Willow, director of Article 39

Carolyne Willow set up charity Article 39 a year ago because she was convinced that children living away from home needed someone to stand up for their rights.  

The charity, which advocates on behalf of the 80,000 children living in institutional settings in England, takes its name from the section of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) that entitles children to recover from abuse and mistreatment in environments that nurture their health, self-respect and dignity.

Her experiences from 12 years spent working at the Children’s Rights Alliance for England (Crae) and as a children’s social worker before that, had a profound and lasting impact on her. “I was deeply shocked at the practices that I’d seen and heard,” she says.

The allegations of abuse by custody staff against children held at Medway secure training centre (STC) that surfaced in January have reinforced Willow’s view that the “terrible practices of the past are living on in child prisons”.

During her time at Crae, Willow successfully campaigned for transparency in the restraint techniques used by staff in secure settings run by private companies Serco and G4S.

The scandal at Medway STC, also run by G4S, has been a “long time coming” according to Willow.

She describes it as “inexplicable” that the company was allowed to continue caring for children after the death of Gareth Myatt in 2004, who had been restrained by three officers at the G4S-run Rainsbrook STC.

Following the Medway incident, the company has announced it will be selling its 13 children’s homes, and ending contracts to run Medway and Oakhill STCs. Rainsbrook STC is also in the process of being handed over to a new provider.

“If the contract [for Medway STC] is simply being sold then that on its own is not going to bring about transformation in safeguarding systems and culture,” she says. “It is not the end of the risk or the concerns of the care and protection for very vulnerable children.”

Aside from the conditions in the secure estate, Willow is also concerned by the interim findings of the Youth Justice Review, led by Charlie Taylor, that calls for the creation of academy-style secure schools as an alternative to custody.

“The world view that children’s difficulties will be solved by giving them high-quality education, I think, is too simplistic,” she says.

“It doesn’t take in the other aspects of the child’s wellbeing and development that must be attended to, and the challenges of running institutions for children who have been defined as ‘bad’ and unworthy of care or protection.”

Too many locked up

She says that the root of the problem lay in too many young people being locked up.

“The next stage of Taylor’s work, I would hope, is to conduct a serious analysis of which children actually need to be in a locked environment,” Willow says.

And those who do need to be in a locked environment, Willow says, should be placed somewhere that meets all of their needs as a child – including attachment, being able to achieve outside of education, and having a sense of belonging with their own family, or through parenting provided by children’s services.

She says this model already exists in secure children’s homes (SCH)because they are “legally defined, regulated and staffed as places that have to meet all of children’s needs”.

“That is the outcome I’d expect from a holistic assessment of what they need – that’s where I would expect the Taylor review to arrive at.”

However, Willow says there are two hurdles the review will inevitably encounter. The first, she says, is that all but one of the country’s SCHs are run by children’s services, “which obviously doesn’t fit the academy model”.

The second hurdle is the cost of developing and running such provision.

“Cost per place in a secure children’s home is a lot higher than places in youth offender institutions (YOI), but you’re not comparing like for like,” she says. “Almost everybody admits that YOIs do not protect and do not care for children adequately.

“If you looked at acute paediatric care, for example, that is far more expensive than a children’s home. So it’s about switching your mindset and taking the penal institution out of the equation and not drawing comparisons with those institutions.

“Once you stop comparing SCHs with prisons, and start comparing them with, for example, acute paediatric care, then we can then see that the cost and resources required to look after children are very reasonable.”

But Willow does see one important positive to come from the review’s findings.

She says: “You can see on every page that children are referred to as children, which may seem obvious but it wasn’t in the recent past.

“Advocates for a more humane justice system have had to make this argument that children in secure settings are children like all other children, so that’s a great start.

“You have to have a pro-child culture that respects and understands children’s rights, and is an environment of expertise in dealing with the day-to-day challenges of looking after children who are very distressed, who have suffered enormously in their past.

“If you bring in individuals to work in those environments that have not had the professional training, supervision or experience of working with children who need the best of care and attention, then that really is a recipe for abusive cultures and practices developing.”

Another issue in Willow’s in-tray is the government inquiry into historical sexual abuse that is being overseen by High Court judge Lowell Goddard.

Defending the wrong people

Willow says that while she has “high hopes” the inquiry will bring justice to the victims involved, she is “not sure just how the inquiry will be seeking to find out from individuals who worked in institutions why children were so badly let down, and why people didn’t intervene at the time to stop abuse and protect children,” she says.

“It may be that a process different from a judicial inquiry is required to understand from people that worked inside, what was it about their organisation – the management or culture – that allowed children to be hurt and for individuals not to feel in a position to challenge that?”

She says the same questions apply to the Medway STC scandal also.

“We have to understand why, when things go wrong, people’s first instinct is to stand with colleagues and the organisation rather than the child,” she explains.

Despite these concerns, Willow is upbeat. She thinks that children’s rights will have greater prominence in the future.

“You always have to be hopeful as a children’s rights advocate; I’m always optimistic,” she says.

This optimism partly stems from the UNCRC’s upcoming examination of the UK government’s record on children’s rights. It will shine the light on the government’s failure to incorporate the convention into domestic law, so when parliamentary bills are drafted, the impact on children’s rights has not been routinely considered.

“It is a big commitment from government we are yet to see,” she says. “It is to be hoped, together with the committee examination, that there are some significant pledges and commitments to children’s rights.

“We have human rights treaties because they show us what should be done for children.

“It is ministers’ responsibility to make good these rights; as a nation, 25 years ago we went to the UN and made a legal undertaking to implement them.”


Carolyne Willow CV

• Feb 2015 Founded Article 39
• 2012-2014 Wrote Children Behind Bars, a book about the youth justice system that was published in January 2015 by Policy Press
• July 2000 National co-ordinator, Children’s Rights Alliance for England
• February 1998 Adult support worker, Article 12
• September 1996 Head of children’s participation programme, National Children’s Bureau
• November 1992 Children’s rights officer, Leicestershire County Council
• July 1998 Children’s social worker, Nottinghamshire County Council