People walk past a police vehicle outside a police station in London, Britain, on Aug. 8, 2022. (Xinhua/Li Ying)
Black children in England and Wales were up to six times more likely to be strip-searched, while white children were around half as likely to be searched, said the report.
LONDON, March 28 (Xinhua) -- Strip-searching of children by police in the United Kingdom (UK) is "deeply concerning," Children's Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza has said in a report released recently.
A total of 2,847 children were strip-searched in England and Wales from 2018 to mid-2022, by police using their 'stop and search' powers.
According to de Souza's report, children as young as eight are being strip-searched by the police in inappropriate places, including the back of police vans, schools and fast-food outlets.
Black children in England and Wales were up to six times more likely to be strip-searched, while white children were around half as likely to be searched, said the report.
Children walk past a police vehicle outside a police station in London, Britain, on Aug. 8, 2022. (Xinhua/Li Ying)
Moreover, the report found that police did not follow the rules in more than half of strip-searches conducted, amounting to "widespread non-compliance". In half of all searches, nothing was found.
One in 100 strip-searches of children took place in public view, while 6 percent were conducted in the presence of an officer of a different gender from the child. In 52 percent of cases, appropriate adults were not present.
A total of 95 percent of those strip-searched were boys, while 5 percent of searches were carried out on girls.
De Souza said she had conducted her first investigation into strip-searching of children in the wake of the case of Child Q, which took place in Hackney in 2022.
Child Q, a 15-year-old schoolgirl in London, was wrongly suspected by police of carrying cannabis. She was pulled out of class and strip-searched while she was menstruating, without teachers being present at the search by two female officers.
De Souza also expressed serious concerns over the poor quality of record-keeping, which she said makes transparency and scrutiny very difficult.
Despite changes to local policy, the national rules under which Child Q was searched have not yet been addressed, De Souza said. ■
