Of these people, 754 (10 per cent) were secluded at some time during the
reporting period.
People who were secluded were often secluded more than once (on
average 2.2 times). Therefore, the number of seclusion events in
adult inpatient services (1,668) was higher than the number of people
secluded.
Across all inpatient services, including forensic, intellectual disability
and youth services, 1001 people experienced at least one seclusion
event. Of those secluded, 69 per cent were male and 31 per cent were
female. The most common age group for those secluded was 20–24
years. A total of 121 young people (aged 19 years and under) were
secluded during the 2015 year, in 289 seclusion events”.29
It should be noted that 72 per cent of seclusion events in 2015 lasted less than
24 hours (ibid.)
The prevalence of Secure Care Unit placements in
Children and Young Persons’ Care and Protection
residences, and in Youth Justice residences
The data below is from the Secure Care Unit registers in the Children and Young
Persons’ Care and Protection residence and the Youth Justice residence visited.30
As this data is not usually collected centrally, it was extracted especially for
this report. Mechanical restraints are no longer used in Care and Protection
residences or in Youth Justice residences. Instead, at the time of the visits
residences used the Non-Violent Crisis Intervention (NVCI) system of personal
restraint, and were planning to move to the Managing Aggression and Perceived
Aggression (MAPA) which focuses more on de-escalation techniques. These were
not examined in this report.
Data for Secure Care Unit stays in the Care and Protection residence indicated
that between May and October 2016, twenty children spent time in the Secure
Care Unit in the course of 76 different occurrences. The duration of stays was as
follows:
29 The Office of the Director of Mental Health Annual Report for 2015, Seclusion data. We were unable to
gather all the data needed for this review, and have therefore decided, for the sake of consistency, to focus
on nationally recorded data instead.
30 The term 'child' is used here to describe any person below the age of 18 (as defined in Article 1 of the UN
Convention on the Right of the Child). This definition differs from that of New Zealand's Children, Young
Persons and their Families Act 1989, which defines 'child' as 'any boy or girl under the age of 14' and a
'young person' as 'a boy or girl of or over the age of 14 years but under 17 years' (Section 2 of the Act). At
the Care and Protection residence visited, at the time of the visit the youngest child was 11 years old, and
the oldest was 15 years old.
28