Commissioner: Child strip search numbers far too high
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
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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.