Commissioner: Child strip search numbers far too high

ODN

The Children’s Commissioner for England says the number of strip searches done on young people is “far too high” and with “far too low a bar”. Dame Rachel de Souza’s report, published on Monday, is the third in a series produced after a 15-year-old black girl - known as Child Q - was strip searched at her school in Hackney, east London, in 2020. Report by Blairm. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn

Transcript

00:00Although the numbers are coming down they're still far too high and we've got to remember

00:05these are children going through this most traumatic search so it's far too high and for

00:12far too low a bar. Suspecting someone smells of drugs or has drugs just isn't a good enough reason

00:18to put children through this kind of experience. What police chiefs say to me is that they need

00:23to be able to do this you know for serious crime. I'm saying a matter of life and death should be

00:30the that it should be the highest bar if you're going to do them at all. There are so many other

00:35things that police can do rather than this intrusive, immediate, often in an inappropriate

00:42place search. There is a genuine disproportionality both in terms of race and you know 95 percent

00:48of children strip search to boys. Look when I talk to parents black parents who this has

00:54happened to they say there is no surprise in our communities whatsoever and you know there are

01:00there's research explanations talking about adultification that black children are often

01:05seen as older and certainly the youth justice board are very interested in exploring that.

01:11I mean it's deeply concerning and I will not stop collecting this data until that figure

01:18goes down. It's not acceptable in our country today that you are

01:24so much more likely to be strip searched if you are black.

Category

Transcript

Recommended