Half of young people in secure homes are innocent of any crime

Almost half of the young people in secure children's homes have not been convicted of any crime, but have been placed there by local authorities for their own protection, the Observer has established.

Penal campaigners, childcare experts and leading charities have expressed alarm at the proportion of innocent teenage girls and boys held alongside convicted juveniles.

Child-grooming scandals in Rochdale, Telford, Derby and Oxford have made local authorities far more aware of the plight of vulnerable young people, often those who are in care or come from chaotic backgrounds and have mental health or addiction problems. The exposure of high-profile celebrity abusers, such as Jimmy Savile, has also moved the issue of child protection centre stage.

Failures in standards of care, identified in serious case reviews, have seen councils become more interventionist in their approach to child protection, with the result that there has been an increase in the number of children being locked up "for their own safety".

"No council wants another Rochdale on their hands," said Jo Phoenix, professor of criminology at the University of Leicester, who questioned the effect that incarceration was having on children with severe sexual and mental problems. "Secure accommodation may well remove the immediate risk of violence, exploitation, homelessness and so on," Phoenix said. "It may be possible to do many things with a young person in secure accommodation, but the social, psychological and material privations surrounding their sexual exploitation will never be addressed."

The Howard League for Penal Reform said it was aware that the Secure Accommodation Network – the body responsible for allocating places in secure children's homes – was now receiving several calls a day from councils trying to place vulnerable children, but a shortage of rooms had meant that many attempts had been unsuccessful.

Frances Crook, the league's director, said she was aware of one case in which a girl was held in a police station for three days because no alternative accommodation could be found. "We have a history of locking up women for their own good, girls who get pregnant. Mental hospitals are full of women who self-injure," Crook said. "We need a victim-led policy."

According to official figures, of the 229 children being held in secure children's homes in the year to 31 March this year, 45% were placed by local authorities on welfare grounds. This compares with just 28% in 2011. More than four out of 10 of those held on welfare grounds are girls.

The sharp rise is understood to have triggered concern within the Department for Education (DfE), which has discussed the issue with the Association of Directors of Children's Services.

Some experts said local authorities faced a difficult dilemma and that incarceration was the "least bad" option. An absence of alternative accommodation and the fact that some vulnerable children keep running away means a place in a secure children's home is better than leaving them vulnerable to predatory gangs.

Sheila Taylor, chief executive of the NWG Network, which tackles child sexual exploitation, said it was not until Operation Retriever in 2010, the prosecution of a grooming gang in Derby, that the issue of child sexual exploitation became widely recognised. "It's an area that professionals are only just coming to grips with," Taylor said. "As a result, we don't have enough of the right places to send young people to."

Taylor said she knew of one young girl who had been forced to have sex with 43 men in one night. Over a number of years, this could translate to hundreds of men. "We need to understand how we can help these children repair and recover," Taylor said. She said that the Netherlands operated a specialist refuge for trafficked children, something the UK might seek to emulate.

Locking up innocent children is legally questionable. A 2012 briefing from the Office of the Children's Commissioner said: "Authorities, parents or even young people themselves cannot give their own consents for a child to have their liberty restricted. Therapy and behaviour management do not provide a reasonable excuse for restricting the liberty of a child in a children's home which is not approved as secure accommodation."

The DfE said it was vital that young people at risk of exploitation were identified and protected. "Councils have a legal obligation to provide children in their care with a safe and secure home," the spokesman said. "We continue to work with councils to review how the care system can best meet the needs of young people."

Wendy Shepherd, Barnardo's national implementation manager on child sexual exploitation, said secure accommodation should be used only when alternatives had been exhausted and called for the creation of safe houses and an expansion in the number of specialist foster carers.

"Children and young people need to feel a level of care that some of these perpetrators who abuse them manage to offer them," Shepherd said. "We need them to understand that they are not to blame for what has happened to them and to ensure they do not end up mad, bad or sad."