29 **Boys** Died In Prison

Yep; from what I could tell from the list of names shown by the BBC's Newsnight programme, they were ALL boys.

But the BBC Newsnight team did not mention this fact throughout the programme. The deaths were said to be those of 'children'.

Here is the blurb from the Newnight website; ...

Twenty-nine children have died in custody in England and Wales since 1990. A terrible set of unlinked individual tragedies or an illustration of the inability of the prison system to cope with the vulnerable young people entrusted to its care? We jail nearly 3,000 children between the ages of 10 and 17 every year. But is it doing any of us - society or the children themselves - any good?

The latest in our series Generation Next investigates what it means to be a child in custody.

Can you imagine how the Newsnight team - and the whole of the media - would have presented this item of news had even the majority of deaths been of girls? - let alone all of them.

Indeed, despite the fact that some 10 times more male than female prison inmates commit suicide in UK prisons, Newsnight has had two stories focusing on female inmate suicides but none, as far as I am aware, that focus on male suicides.

And the reason for this is that the BBC is always at pains to actively hide any suffering that men and boys might be enduring.