In May 2006, when he was 6 years old, Nate Farnham was removed from his mother’s custody by Vermont’s Department for Children and Families.
His mother, with whom he no longer speaks, had a substance use disorder, he said. From his home in Cambridge, Farnham was taken to the Brattleboro Retreat, a residential mental health facility, where he spent most of the next year and a half.
There, he clashed frequently with others in the program — “I was extremely violent,” Farnham said — and staff routinely used physical force to subdue him.
“Take a kid that’s, you know, almost 7 years old, about 100 pounds soaking wet, and lay two people that are (together) upwards of 400-plus pounds on him,” Farnham said.
Nearly 20 years later, he said, those incidents of physical restraint have had a profound and lasting impact on him: Physically and psychologically, it was “devastational,” he said.
Farnham is among an untold number of Vermont youth who have been subjected to physical force while in state custody over the years. Now, two years of data — the first figures to be released by the state — shows that such incidents have happened hundreds of times just in the recent past.
Vermont youth in residential facilities in the custody of the Department for Children and Families were restrained or secluded, meaning forcibly immobilized or isolated in a room, hundreds of times in 2023 and 2024, the new data shows. As recently as last year, according to the data, children as young as 8 were physically restrained, and children as young as 5 were secluded, sometimes for half an hour or longer.
Advocates believe those figures are incomplete, recording only a fraction of the incidents that actually occurred. Even so, the data offers a window into the residential facilities where Vermont sends children and teens — and the sometimes-traumatic events that take place there.
Administrators at residential facilities contacted by VTDigger said they are constantly trying to reduce the use of restraints and seclusions, but the practices are sometimes necessary for safety reasons.
But restraints and seclusion can be dangerous and psychologically damaging. For youth experiencing them, they can represent a traumatic loss of physical autonomy, Matthew Bernstein, Vermont’s Child, Youth, and Family Advocate, said in an interview.
“And for a lot of these kids, their bodily autonomy is essentially the last thing they have left,” he said.
What are restraint and seclusion?
The term “restraint” refers to a practice in which a person is physically held to prevent them from moving. It’s defined by the U.S. Department of Education as “a personal restriction that immobilizes or reduces the ability of a student to move his or her torso, arms, legs, or head freely.”
Seclusions, meanwhile, are instances where a youth is isolated in a room to prevent them from causing harm to themselves or others. The tactics are supposed to be used only as a last resort, and only as a safety measure.
“The function of restraint is really to provide for a safety environment,” Tyler Allen, who oversees residential facilities for the state Department for Children and Families, said in an interview earlier this year. “Restraint is really grounded in safety practice, and if the environment is safe, then there is more opportunity for therapy.”
Both state officials and advocates for youth in state custody agree restraints and seclusions may be unavoidable in some cases. But the tactics can cause injuries and, in some cases, death.
In 2021, for example, the parents of a then-15-year-old girl who stayed at the Vermont Permanency Initiative, a Bennington nonprofit that operates the Vermont School for Girls and the New England School for Girls, filed a federal lawsuit alleging that staff there had broken their daughter’s femur during a 2015 restraint. The case was settled under undisclosed terms the next year.
A spokesperson for the nonprofit declined to comment on the suit. Through a lawyer, the parents of the child also declined to comment.
The tactics can also cause lasting trauma to youths who may already be traumatized.
“From a psychological standpoint, it’s never good,” said Farnham, the former resident, who has advocated for stronger oversight of residential youth facilities.
Being restrained repeatedly while in state custody, he said, has had a long-lasting impact on his behavior. When in rooms with large crowds, he said, he immediately notes the exits and avoids going to corners — where, as a child in Vermont residential facilities, staff sometimes caught him before a restraint.
“If you were to hang out with me for, like, a week,” he said, “you would see all the little things that I do that most people probably would not.”
Newly compiled data
Under a Vermont law that went into effect in 2023, the Department for Children and Families is required to report all instances of restraint and seclusion of youth in state custody — even those housed out of state — to the Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate. VTDigger obtained the first data compiled by the department showing restraints and seclusions in residential facilities in 2023 and 2024.
Over that two-year period, youths were physically restrained or isolated over 500 times in roughly a dozen facilities, according to the data.
Advocates, state officials and program leaders say a small number of children account for a disproportionate share of the incidents. Fifty-eight individual youths in state custody accounted for the entirety of the incidents for the second half of 2023 and all of 2024, according to the department.
It’s difficult to determine what percentage of youth in residential institutions that number represents, but Allen, of the Department for Children and Families, said that it represents just a “fraction” of the total number of youths who spent time in facilities in that time period.
“I don’t think this data shows something unusual or something changing or something aberrant,” he said. “But I think we can also acknowledge that restraint and seclusion incidents are not, in and of themself, a therapeutic intervention.”
The department believes that its numbers for the second half of 2023 and 2024 are largely accurate: “Our belief is that it is unlikely that there are many (if any) unaccounted individuals in our numbers,” Allen wrote in an email.
But the Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate estimates that the real number of incidents is likely in the thousands. The office sometimes hears from youth and family members about incidents of restraint or seclusion that were not counted in the data, the office’s deputy advocate, Lauren Higbee, said in an interview.
What’s more, the statute requires the state to report all instances of restraint or seclusion involving youth in the department’s custody, not just those in residential facilities. But Higbee said her office has received no reports of restraints that took place in other settings.
“There are still schools to consider, there’s still hospitals to consider, there’s still inpatient psychiatric facilities to consider,” she said. “And we have no reports from them.”
The majority of incidents reported in both 2023 and 2024 come from Seall, a residential treatment facility in Bennington. Descriptions of some of the 2023 incidents, written by staffers, provide a sobering picture of life at the facility, recounting episodes where children attempted to harm others or themselves, break objects or escape.
In January 2023, a teenager was trying to get into an office room where staff were storing a confiscated vape, according to the description of the incident. When staff told the teen that she could not enter the office, the girl began to act out: She “was laughing and stating she would fight staff and break the door,” the description reads. “(She) did this multiple times, then kicked the staff office door breaking the frame, again trying to get into the office. She was placed in a restraint.”
A March 2023 incident involved a teen who “had been struggling with self-harm,” according to a description of the event. “Staff were informed that she may have something in her room to self-harm with. She was searched with a metal detector. When staff left, she was seen grabbing something from under her mattress. Staff attempted to get (her) to hand it over but she wouldn’t. She was put in a hold to get the item from her.”
In one July 2023 episode, a child at Seall “was acting out at bedtime and was told he’d be given a consequence if he didn’t stop which upset him,” a description reads. “He began threatening staff. He then kicked staff and was placed in a hold for safety.”
‘Individuals with complex needs’
Leaders at Vermont’s residential youth facilities said they are actively working to reduce the number of restraints and seclusions they use.
Jim Henry, the executive director of Seall, said in an emailed statement that the 2020 closure of Vermont’s only youth detention center, Woodside, had “introduced a unique group of individuals with complex needs” into Seall’s population. That coincided with a “dramatic increase in the use of restraints,” he wrote.
The facility has increased staff, shortened employee workweeks and sought to make the space more therapeutic for youths, Henry said, including hosting weekly visits from a therapy dog and adding off-site activities.
“We remain deeply aware of the emotional impact that a physical intervention can have on both youth and staff,” Henry said.
Vermont Permanency Initiative, the Bennington nonprofit that operates residential facilities there, reported 36 restraints of Vermont youth in 2024. In three of those incidents, 15-year-old youths were restrained for over 15 minutes.
Administrators there said in an interview that they meet weekly to discuss the restraints that took place over the past week and trends in the data they collect. A spike in restraints can often be traced to one particular youth struggling with their emotions after just entering the program or with a traumatic incident at home, they said.
Jeff Caron, the president of the Vermont Permanency Initiative, said in an interview that the data does not capture much of the reality on the ground: Youth enter the facility with mental health issues, family trauma, sometimes aggression or tendencies to self-harm.
“The numbers have to have context, you know?” he said. “I mean, it’s not that staff are coming in (saying) ‘I can’t wait to put my hands on that kid!’ It’s dealing with the behaviors that we have. And glass cuts people — if they smash a window, you’re gonna hold them.”
The Brattleboro Retreat’s Abigail Rockwell Children’s Center, a youth residential treatment program, reported 17 restraints in 2024. One of those incidents, a “supine floor hold” of a 10-year-old child, lasted for 57 minutes, according to the records.
Karl Jeffries, the Brattleboro Retreat’s chief medical officer, said in an interview that the program is “always working, absolutely all the time, to do everything we can to not restrain.”
Staff there restrain a patient only when there is no other way to ensure their safety or the safety of others, Jeffries said. And “every time one of them happens, we have an organization-wide meeting the next morning to talk about them, review them, and see if there are things that we can do, any ways to decrease the risk of this happening again.”
Asked about the nearly hourlong restraint of the 10-year-old, Jeffries said restraints at the organization are usually brief. But one of the cruel ironies of restraints is that a tactic intended to de-escalate a situation can in fact end up prolonging it.
“The challenge is that the act of physically holding somebody can really be a provocative event,” Jeffries said.
The 2024 data includes incidents from other programs as well. Community House, a Brattleboro nonprofit, reported 46 incidents of restraint, seclusion or “transport” — meaning, physically moving a youth to a safer space — involving children ages 5 to 10. Twenty-nine of those incidents involved seclusion, per the data.
A representative of Community House did not respond to phone calls or emails. The facility operates a short-term “stabilization and assessment program,” according to its website.
Brookhaven Treatment and Learning Center, in Chelsea, reported two 2024 incidents to the state, both involving a 12-year-old. Both incidents involved a seclusion — one of which lasted for a total of 42 minutes.
Rocky Spino, Brookhaven’s executive director, declined to answer questions about the facility’s use of restraints and seclusions.
“I would offer that the topic of ‘restraints and seclusions of youth’ is much too comprehensive and nuanced to accurately capture with a quick series of quotes and in the confines of a print media article,” Spino said in an email.
A handful of out-of-state facilities, in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Florida, also reported roughly two dozen restraints and seclusions of Vermont youth in 2024, per the data.
‘A system of accountability’
Vermont lawmakers are discussing a bill related to restraints and seclusions of youth in state custody, although the legislation is still in its early stages and will not advance until at least next year.
The bill, H.30, aims to improve the data being collected and proposes to require “professional development on alternatives to restraint and seclusion” for staff of residential programs.
“This is a very simple bill,” Rep. Tiff Bluemle, D-Burlington, the bill’s lead sponsor, said in an interview earlier this year. “It really is focused on building a system of accountability.”
The Office of the Child, Youth, and Family Advocate is asking lawmakers to strengthen the bill further by banning particularly dangerous prone restraints outright, and by standardizing and hastening the response times for reporting incidents.
“Basically, the concern is that a child will be very seriously injured or killed because there is insufficient oversight of this,” Bernstein, the state’s child advocate, said.
