============================================================================ THE UN'S OWN STUDY SAYS BOYS FACE DISCRIMINATORY TREATMENT. THE VERSION SENT TO MEMBER STATES LEFT THAT OUT. ============================================================================ Chapter 8 of the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty opens by saying that boys often face discriminatory treatment and are overrepresented everywhere, because of stereotypes about how violent they are. The 23-page note that went to the General Assembly keeps the striking number, 94 per cent of detained children are boys, and drops the finding. Its recommendations chapter drops the word boys altogether. Three stages of one study, and the same half goes at every step. By Mikal Monslaup with Claude (Anthropic) Kairunen on X Rickmyrolls on Reddit The reporting, the reading and the conclusions are mine. Claude did the searching, the counting, the checking and much of the drafting, and argued back when a claim was thinner than it sounded. Every figure here has a primary source you can open, because neither of us is asking to be believed. First published: 18 August 2026 (2026-08-18T09:40:00+02:00) Canonical: https://unformentoo.org/boys-in-detention.html IN SHORT ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * The UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, 804 pages, 2019, led by Manfred Nowak. Its chapter 8 is on the gender dimension. * Chapter 8 opens by saying boys “often face discriminatory treatment” and are overrepresented “due to stereotypical views on the propensity of boys towards violent behaviour”. * The note transmitted to the General Assembly, A/74/136 (https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=A/74/136&l=en&t=pdf), contains none of that language. * It does contain the figure: 94 per cent of children detained in the administration of justice, armed conflict and national security are boys. * The note has 20 sentences mentioning violence. Two name girls. 0 name a boy. * The full volume has 450, and nine name boys, including: “Although less information is available, boys are also subjected to sexual violence while in detention.” * The note’s recommendations chapter contains the word boys 0 times, and contains one recommendation naming girls. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 01. A MINIMUM OF 1.3 MILLION What the study is, and the sentence in it that nobody quotes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- In December 2014 the General Assembly invited the Secretary-General to commission an in-depth study on children deprived of liberty. Manfred Nowak was appointed to lead it in October 2016, and the result was transmitted to member states on 11 July 2019 as A/74/136 (https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=A/74/136&l=en&t=pdf). It is the most complete count anyone has of the children the world locks up. The headline number is in paragraph 86: a minimum of between 1.3 and 1.5 million children deprived of liberty every year. Institutions hold the largest share, then the administration of justice, then migration detention, then armed conflict. That is the figure the coverage led on, and it deserved to. Fifty-one paragraphs before it, on page nine, there is a section headed Gender dimension. It is four paragraphs long. This is the first of them, in full. "The data collected for the study indicate significant gender disparities in the situation of children deprived of liberty. Altogether, there are far more boys deprived of liberty worldwide than girls. In the administration of justice and in the contexts of armed conflicts and national security, 94 per cent of all detained children are boys; in migration detention the figure is 67 per cent and in institutions it is 56 per cent." -- A/74/136, paragraph 35 Ninety-four per cent. Not a campaign's figure. Not an advocacy group's estimate. A study commissioned by the General Assembly, delivered by an Independent Expert, transmitted by the Secretary-General, and sitting on page nine of a twenty-three page document that member states were sent. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02. WHO GETS DIVERTED The study does not only count. It explains, and one of its explanations is remarkable. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- The next paragraph asks why. It gives a funnel: girls are attributed roughly a third of all criminal offences committed by children worldwide, and receive 6 per cent of prison sentences. It then lists reasons, and it lists them fairly. Girls commit less violent offences. Girls are more often accused of status offences. Girls are generally first-time offenders and, in the study's words, more receptive to the deterrent effect of incarceration. Those are real and they are not disputed here. But the study does not stop there. "Another explanation is the “chivalrous and paternalistic” attitude of many male judges and prosecutors in the child justice systems, who assume, according to traditional gender stereotypes, that girls are more in need of protection than boys." -- A/74/136, paragraph 36 Read that again with the campaign's usual framing removed. A UN study is saying that a gender stereotype produces a worse outcome for boys, and naming the mechanism: adults in the system assume boys need less protecting. That is a finding about how a stereotype harms the sex it is supposed to flatter, written down by the United Nations, in 2019. One paragraph later, a second finding, this one about fathers. Most states allow a convicted mother to keep her young child with her in prison. The study reports that only eight states explicitly permit a father to do the same, and that even where it is permitted there are almost no father and child units, so in practice it does not happen. Now the part this site is obliged to print, because the same document says it and leaving it out would make this article the thing it is criticising. Paragraph 38 is about girls, and it is not a footnote. "While boys are overrepresented in detention, girls often suffer gender-based discrimination. Research conducted for the study shows that girls are more likely to be arrested for status offences, for behaviour rather than actual criminal activity, including sexual activity, truancy and running away from home. […] In detention, girls are particularly vulnerable to sexual and other forms of violence." -- A/74/136, paragraph 38 Paragraph 39 does the same for LGBTI children, who it reports are overrepresented in child justice facilities, placed in unsuitable facilities and particularly vulnerable to violence. Both paragraphs are true, both matter, and neither is in tension with the 94 per cent. A group can be the overwhelming majority of a detained population and other groups can still face distinct harms inside it. The study holds both. So does this article. Except that it does not hold them the same way, and the reason took me to a second document. Behind the twenty-three page note there is the study itself: 804 pages, published in 2019 under Manfred Nowak's name. Its chapter 8 is called Gender Dimension, and it opens like this. "This chapter shines a spotlight on the fact that boys often face discriminatory treatment and are over represented in all situations of deprivation of liberty due to stereotypical views on the propensity of boys towards violent behaviour." -- Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, chapter 8, Gender Dimension Boys often face discriminatory treatment. That is not this campaign's phrasing. It is the study's, in the opening line of the chapter where it examines sex. It names the mechanism too: stereotypical views about how violent boys are. Now search the note that was sent to member states for that finding. Discriminatory treatment does not appear in it. Neither does stereotypical views, nor propensity, nor the spotlight the chapter says it is shining. What survived the journey from the study to the General Assembly is the number, 94 per cent, and the word that explains it, chivalrous. The finding that boys face discriminatory treatment did not make the summary. The chapter does not bury it, either. Its second section carries a heading of its own, listed in the study's contents: Discrimination against Boys. Under that heading the study writes a sentence that almost nobody in this field writes down. "Most research on the gender dimension of deprivation of liberty relates to the administration of criminal justice and primarily addresses cases of discrimination against girls, not against boys." -- UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, chapter 8, page 227 That is the argument this campaign exists to make, printed inside a UN study, under a heading, with footnotes. The research addresses discrimination against girls, not against boys. It is not written as an accusation. It is written as a description of the literature the study had just finished reading. The chapter goes further and reproduces, at length, an academic's judgement that the children's rights movement itself avoids the question, a passage the study chose to quote rather than to answer. The same attenuation shows up in what each document says about violence. In the note there are twenty sentences mentioning violence: eighteen about children generally, two naming girls, none naming a boy, a male, a man, him or his. In the full volume there are 450, and nine of them do name boys. So the study is not silent. It records a boy beaten with a wooden stick until he nearly lost an eye, and it records this: "Although less information is available, boys are also subjected to sexual violence while in detention." -- Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, chapter on armed conflict Read the first clause again. The study is not only reporting a harm to boys, it is reporting that less is known about it, which is the entire argument of this website written by the people who did the counting. And that sentence, like the discriminatory treatment sentence, is not in the note either. So paragraph 38 is not the balance it reads as, and the reason is now visible in three stages of one study. The 804-page volume says boys face discriminatory treatment and that less is known about violence against them. The 23-page note to member states keeps the 94 per cent and drops both. The recommendations chapter inside that note drops the word boys altogether. Each step is shorter than the one before, which is what a summary is for. But at every step it is the same half that goes. I want to be careful about what this does and does not show. Nothing here says girls are not at particular risk in detention; the volume documents that at length and in more detail than it documents boys, and some of that gap is the study telling you honestly that the research does not exist. Nothing here says anyone dropped anything on purpose. I do not know why the sentence went, and neither does anyone who has not seen the drafting. What is checkable is that it went. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 03. THEN IT WROTE THE RECOMMENDATIONS Where the finding goes, which is nowhere. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A study like this ends by telling states what to do. In A/74/136 that is chapter VIII, running from paragraph 98 to the end of the document, about sixteen thousand characters of general and situation-specific recommendations. I extracted it and counted whole words in it. The chapter is not silent on sex. It contains the word girls once, in a recommendation about children associated with armed forces and armed groups, asking that assistance take account of their specific situation and needs and provide tailored measures. That recommendation is good. It should be there. It is also, precisely, the thing that did not get written for the 94 per cent. The number is in the study. The number is not in the ask. There is one subject where the two documents can be laid directly on top of each other, because both examine it and both arrive at a recommendation about it. Diversion is the decision to deal with a child outside the courts, and it is the difference between a criminal record and none. Paragraph 36 of the note reports the disparity itself. "Compared with the overall crime rate for children, the data gathered for the study show a tendency of the child justice system to be more inclined to apply diversion measures to girls than boys." -- A/74/136, paragraph 36 The full study then says what should be done about it, in one sentence, naming both. "Diversion measures should equally be applied to boys and girls and be appropriate to the child’s age, level of maturity, as well as the situation in the community." -- UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, recommendations chapter The note’s recommendation on diversion reads, in full: States should prioritize restorative justice, diversion from judicial proceedings and non-custodial solutions. The word equally is gone, and so are boys and girls. The word equal does survive into that chapter, once, in a recommendation that girls associated with armed forces be guaranteed equal access to rehabilitation and reintegration. That recommendation belongs there. So did the other one. I want to be careful about what this does and does not show, because the easy version of this paragraph is wrong. The recommendations are largely written for all children, and boys are children, so they are covered by construction. Nobody is excluded. That is a fair reading and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But universal coverage is what the rest of this site keeps running into. A recommendation that covers everyone assigns nothing to anyone. When the study wanted a group's needs taken into account specifically, it knew exactly how to say so, and it said so for girls in armed conflict. It had the same sentence available for the group that is 94 per cent of the population it had just measured, and it did not write it. This is not a failure of noticing. The noticing is the best thing in the document. It is a failure of the step after noticing, which is the step this campaign is about. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- So what would have been enough? One sentence. A recommendation, in chapter VIII, asking states to address the overrepresentation of boys by extending to them the diversion measures the study had just shown are more readily applied to girls. It would have cost the study nothing, it would have taken nothing from girls, and it would have given the 94 per cent somewhere to go. Instead the figure sits in paragraph 35, where it has sat since July 2019, correct and unattached. Seven years. I have not found a later UN document that picks it up, and I have looked; if one exists I want to be sent it and I will print the correction. There is a version of this article that is angry at the Independent Expert, and it would be stupid. He is the reason the number exists. The people who counted the boys are not the people who failed them. The gap is between the counting and the asking, and there is nobody standing in it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE DOCUMENTS THIS RESTS ON ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/74/136 Global study on children deprived of liberty: note by the Secretary-General https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?s=A/74/136&l=en&t=pdf Global Study The United Nations Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, full volume, 804 pages https://childrendeprivedofliberty.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Full-Global-Study_Revised-Version.pdf ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOURCE NOTES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * Both documents were downloaded and read here: the 23-page note A/74/136 and the 804-page full study volume. Both are held in this site’s evidence archive. Every count in this article was produced from the extracted text of those files, not from a summary of them. * A/74/136 was downloaded and read in full on 18 August 2026 before this was written, and the copy is held in this site's evidence archive with its SHA-256 recorded in the manifest. * The sentence counts in section two were produced by splitting the extracted text on sentence boundaries and matching whole words. Twenty sentences contain a form of the word violence; two of those name girls and none names boys, males, men, him or his. Seven sentences contain the word boys; all seven were read individually rather than classified by pattern, and every one concerns how many boys are detained or why, not what happens to them in detention. * The word counts in this article were produced by extracting the document's text and counting whole words with letter boundaries, not by reading and estimating. The Recommendations chapter was taken from the heading “VIII. Recommendations” to the end of the document, 15,969 characters. Counting from the earlier table-of-contents entry instead gives a different and wrong answer, which is a mistake I made first and corrected. * This article quotes the note transmitted to the General Assembly, not the full study volume behind it. Where the two differ in wording, the transmitted note is the text member states received. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- SOFTENED OR OMITTED FOR ACCURACY ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- * {"wanted":"The UN ignores boys in detention.","published":"A UN study counted them, named the disparity, and then did not carry it into its recommendations.","why":"The first is false and this article exists because it is false. The study is the reason the 94 per cent figure is known at all."} * {"wanted":"The study recommends nothing for girls either.","published":"The Recommendations chapter contains one recommendation naming girls, and none naming boys.","why":"One is not many, and saying so precisely is stronger than implying the chapter is silent on both."} * {"wanted":"Boys are the main victims of child detention.","published":"Boys are the overwhelming majority of children detained. The study also documents distinct harms to girls and to LGBTI children in detention.","why":"Being the majority of a population is not the same as being the whole of its harm, and the same document says so."} * {"wanted":"The UN never looked at what happens to boys in detention.","published":"The full study does look, in nine sentences, one of which says less information is available about boys. The note sent to member states does not.","why":"The first version of this article was written before the 804-page volume was obtained, and the volume disproved it. The narrower claim is the true one and it is also the more interesting one."} ============================================================================ This document is generated from the same source data as https://unformentoo.org/boys-in-detention.html. If the two ever disagree, the page is the one that was rebuilt last; both are regenerated together. ============================================================================