To ask what’s the alternative to a Deprivation of Liberty order?

I hate DoLs but right now, there are not the resources or alternatives to them.

There seem to be a lot of issues:

• Should these exist at all - well possibly for extreme cases
• Are they being applied appropriately and why is there such a huge rise in use of them?
• How they are being implemented - why are men restraining young girls some of whom have been sexually assaulted?
• What help is there with long term impacts - such as education, loss of any positive family and community ties and affect on mental health being under constant surveillance.

Supposed at least there is a panel of experts looking into why the rise in use.

Prevention is always better than cure, but we also need to stop outsourcing the care of vulnerable young people to for profit organisations. It's worth looking at Scandinavian countries, where outcomes are far, far better - and where homes are staffed with well paid and highly qualified people. Caring for vulnerable young people cannot be done on the cheap. It costs. It will also pay for itself by breaking generational cycles of poor parenting, abuse and crime.

I think it's time only female workers are employed to work closely with vulnerable women and girls.

Yes, women can abuse but it's less likely they will compared to men.

Beyond better support for birth parents before it gets to this point I don't think there is currently a better option- some young people are totally out of control and need to be removed from their environment to protect them and some sort of legal provision is needed for this. Obviously the quality of the care when they are removed needs to be much better, but the system is pretty broken.

I think you need to treat the cause, but the problem with acting proactively is that you will inevitably investigate and cause difficulty for innocent people too. These sort of orders are the consequence, you can't stop children being raised in bad environments, getting involved with heroin etc as shown in your BBC article, so they have to be taken into a more restrictive environment. The trouble with these environments is either you have to be strict, which leads to people being treated unfairly/outrageously (as evidenced in your article), or you adopt a more laissez-faire attitude, in which case some people won't get enough supervision and will self-harm or get into crime.

There isn't a solution that will provide the exact right support for every individual case. It's a balance, what causes least harm overall, but there's no such thing as a perfectly average case, everyone is either controlled too much or not enough. It's just the balance of keeping most instances within an acceptable range, most of the time.