The former head of a Norfolk academy trust has asked police to provide figures on how many children have been strip-searched by officers.
Dame Rachel de Souza, who is now the children’s commissioner for England, has written to all police forces requesting information on strip-searches, after discovering that 650 10 to 17-year-olds underwent “intrusive and traumatising” strip-searches by the Metropolitan Police over two years.
It comes in the wake of the Child Q scandal, where a 15-year-old schoolgirl was strip-searched by Met officers while on her period after being wrongly suspected of carrying cannabis at school.
Dame Rachel, formerly head of the Inspiration Trust, which has 14 schools in Norfolk and Suffolk, is seeking further information from between 2018 and July 2022 from other forces, including Norfolk, “to reassure myself that these issues are not more widespread”.
She said: “I firmly believe that a police power that is as intrusive and traumatic for children as a strip-search must be treated with the utmost care and responsibility. It must also be accompanied by a robust and transparent system of scrutiny to protect and safeguard vulnerable children.
“To reassure myself that these issues are not more widespread, I am using my unique statutory powers to ask all police chief officers in England and Wales to collect further information on the conduct of this practice across the country. I will be publishing my analysis of this data in full early next year.”
As part of a standard stop and search, police officers can require strip searching though this does not necessarily denote nudity.
Strip searches of under-18s that involve the exposure of intimate body parts must take place in the presence of an appropriate adult, which cannot be a police officer.
The case of Child Q drew outrage when it first came to light in March this year.
The teenager was strip-searched by female officers in 2020 without another adult present and in the knowledge that she was menstruating, a safeguarding report found.
The review concluded the strip-search should never have happened, was unjustified and racism “was likely to have been an influencing factor”.
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