“Children deprived of their liberty and placed in detention are at extreme risk of violence”, according to the UN Secretary-General’s Study on Violence against Children.

Some sources estimate that, at any one time, at least one million children worldwide are deprived of their liberty. This is certainly an underestimate and better data collection is urgently needed globally. The UN Study notes in this regard that “information is hard to find and data on children in… justice systems are not generally disaggregated.”Similarly, the Committee on the Rights of the Child often expresses concern in its concluding observations on State Party reports about the provision of very limited statistical data on the treatment of children in conflict with the law.

The UN Study contains a set of 13 recommendations for action to effectively prevent and address violence against children in justice systems. One of the recommendations concerns the need to reduce the use of detention, and states that: “Governments should ensure that detention is only used for child offenders who are assessed as posing a real danger to others, and then only as a last resort, for the shortest necessary time, and following judicial hearing, with greater resources invested in alternative family and community-based rehabilitation and reintegration programmes.”