Stop strip-searching youngsters – Black youngsters are 4 occasions prone to be focused
What would you do if your child was strip-searched by police, without you present?
You’d go ballistic wouldn’t you? Whether it was your child, your grandchildren or anyone underage within your extended family.
Well, police have been conducting the practice for quite some time with little, if any, consequences.
We know because the numbers have been released to tell us – and they don’t make for pleasant reading.
Data gathered by Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza has revealed that, from 2018 to mid-2023, police conducted 3,368 child strip-searches. The statistics came from 44 police forces, including the British Transport Police, across England and Wales.
Black children were four times more likely to be forced to have their privacy invaded in such a humiliating way.
Dame de Souza asked for the numbers following the high-profile case of ChildQ, the 15-year-old London schoolgirl strip-searched in 2020 – while menstruating – at her school in Hackney, East London. She’d been wrongly accused of possessing cannabis.
When the scandal broke in May 2022, it emerged, appallingly, that the girl’s parents had not been present while the search took place. Dame de Souza wanted to find out whether the incident was a one-off. It most certainly wasn’t.
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PA)
The numbers reveal one child was searched every 14 hours under police stop and search powers. Also that one in 20 strip-searches was not compliant with statutory codes of practice.
What’s more, between July 2022 and June 2023, 47% of searches resulted in “no further action”. So children were being put through humiliation and trauma for what? Nothing.
Dame de Souza’s report does outline a lower number of overall strip-searches – 42% fewer in 2022 than in 2020 – and better safeguarding referrals. But why are police strip-searching children at all?
How on earth are we ending up in any kind of situation where there is no appropriate adult present, as in 45% of cases between July 2022 and June 2023?
And why, given that last statistic, are police still four times more likely to invade the intimate parts of Black children?
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PA)
Better listening is needed. Technology, if necessary. Electronic wands instead of hands. Officers need training on the concept of “adultification”, the race-related practice of seeing Black children in their teens as adults, meaning they are unjustly punished, hyper-surveilled and hyper-penalised.
It isn’t the case white children should be treated the same – more that children shouldn’t be strip-searched at all.
It is among so many observations in this column that I am sickened to still have to make in 2024.
It isn’t just police on the hook here, either. Had I been a parent of Child Q, I’d have sued every one of the teachers involved in the circumstances that opened the door for officers to invade her privacy on school premises.
We talk a good game about protecting our children but the reality is that so many of the ways we treat them remain beyond the pale.
