“Someone walked into the school, where I was supposed to feel safe, took me away from the people who were supposed to protect me and stripped me naked, while on my period.” These are the words of the 15-year-old black girl we now know as Child Q. In this devastating summary of her violation, Child Q makes clear what key professionals were unwilling to recognise that day: she was a child in need of safeguarding.
Two years stretched between that harrowing ordeal in 2020 and Hackney council’s report on how it could have happened; the conclusion being that “racism … was likely to have been an influencing factor in the decision to undertake the strip-search”. In August, a report by the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, found that black children made up nearly 60% of the 650 who underwent a police strip-search between 2018 and 2020. More than half of those searches resulted in no further action.
