Child strip-search race bias remains - watchdog

Black children are four times more likely to be strip-searched by police in England and Wales than their white counterparts, the latest figures disclosed by a watchdog show.

- Rajeev Syal

The children's commissioner also found that children under the age of 15 were a bigger proportion of those subjected to intimate searches, official figures from the year to June 2023 showed. Fewer than half of all searches of children in that year (45%) were conducted in the presence of an appropriate adult.

A report released today also found that nearly nine out of every 10 searches [88%] conducted by England and Wales's 44 forces were trying to find drugs. It said that over the five years to June 2023, children as young as eight had been stripsearched every 14 hours on average by police in England.

More than 3,000 intimate procedures were conducted on children between January 2018 and June 2023.

In response to the report, police admitted "too many strip-searches carried out are unnecessary, unsafe and under-reported".

The practice of child strip-searches prompted a national outcry after the Child Q scandal, when it emerged in 2022 that a 15-year-old black girl was strip-searched at school for drugs in east London. No cannabis, the grounds for the search, was found.

Assistant chief constable Andrew Mariner, the National Police Chiefs' Council lead for stop and search, said: "Two years on from the shocking case of Child Q, we are seeing progress being made. I welcome this shift, and I am cautiously optimistic about the potential to overcome entrenched systemic challenges, but there is still urgent work to be done: too many stripsearches carried out are unnecessary, unsafe and under-reported."

Mariner added: "Today's research serves as a stark reminder that this is not an isolated issue in the capital. A much higher threshold should be met before a child is subjected to what we know can be a traumatising search.