Ban prone or facedown techniques

An updated Posting on this subject was published on the 20th December 2011: Prone/Facedown: What are your views?

We all know that young people can be challenging, those who end up in care are the most challenging, often violent, high risk takers, pretty scarey on occasions.

There's a reason for this, multiple reasons actually, but I'm not going to address this right now.

The fact is, staff frequently face highly challenging behaviours and sometimes the only - last - resort is to use physical intervention.

People often refer to this as 'Restraint' but Physical Intervention can broadly be divided into 4 categories, Restaint is one of them; the others are holding, touching and physical presence - containing a young person with your presence alone.

Restraint - using physical force to overpower a young person - comes in many forms. One is 'Prone' sometimes also called 'Facedown'.

As the name suggests, this means that the Young Person is laying on the floor, facedown or prone; to necessitate this, 2 or maybe 3 and even 4 adults have to co-ordinate with each other to get the young person into the position. Don't forget, it's a highly charged situation, the young person, often large and wound up tight, is not going to co-operate.

Training manuals state that this 'technique' can only be used upon young people with no pre existing medical conditions such as asthma and extreme caution must be used to ensure that pressure is not placed on the back.

Having been a BILD Accredited Behaviour Management/Physical Intervention Trainer, and longtime professional in children's homes, I know that ANY technique poses problems - hardly any highly challenging situations are managed as per the training manual.

The problem I have with this 'prone' or 'facedown' technique is that it is too risky, potentially life theatening - people (I admit mostly adults but children too) have died as a result of poor use of prone techniques.

The technique is also highly degrading, placing children facedown, in an extremely vulnerable position - bearing in mind that many children in care have been sexually abused, by men - who are usually the people engaged in restraining them.

AND, there are other techniques out there, being used by reputable training companies; also risky and difficult to use, but much less risky, much less degrading.

So I believe it's time to ban prone facedown, it's potentially danergous, unnecessary and degrading.

Read our 'Prone Facedown' Policy Briefing

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