The police watchdog for England and Wales has called for urgent measures to stop the “adultification” of black children by officers, but campaigners have said the revised guidelines do not go far enough.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct identified adultification as a racial bias that primarily affects black children as well as other minority ethnic children, where they are seen as more “streetwise”, more “grown up”, less innocent and less vulnerable.
In the revised guidelines, which were issued this week, the IOPC said it was crucial that officers understood how adultification could influence decision making leading to the “unjust treatment of children”.
While campaigners have welcomed the IOPC’s recognition of the detrimental impact of adultification on children, they have called for a “fundamental shift” in how children are treated by the police.
The term adultification bias has grown in usage the UK in recent years, with the issue brought to the forefront after the treatment of Child Q in December 2020. The then 15-year-old student was strip-searched at her school in Hackney, east London, while menstruating, having been wrongly accused of possessing cannabis. It was an experience she found traumatising and which has been widely condemned.
Three Met officers face disciplinary charges of gross misconduct after an investigation by the IOPC. If found guilty, they could be sacked.
The watchdog said the report was a culmination of more than three years of their work focused on race discrimination, with more than 300 cases analysed.
It highlighted the case of a 14-year-old black boy who was taken to the ground by two officers, who were said to be responding to a report of a 13-year-old boy being robbed at knife-point by other schoolchildren. The officers’ grounds for detaining the 14-year-old boy was that they believed he was one of the suspects.
The IOPC found that two officers should face disciplinary proceedings for their use of force in handcuffing the child, the officers’ actions and comments made during the stop and search, and for allegedly discriminating against the child because of his race and age.
The independent panel found the officers action amounted to misconduct in relation to their use of force, for failing to make reasonable adjustments for the child and for breaching the police standard of professional behaviour relating to integrity, authority, respect and courtesy.
The IOPC’s director general, Rachel Watson, said: “We recognise the commitment across policing to improve the way it handles race discrimination and have seen good progress in some areas including complaint handling – but a lot more needs to be done.
“Too often black communities feel overpoliced as suspects and underprotected. We want to support the police to improve how they deal with race discrimination, to ensure that everyone can have trust and confidence in policing.”
Jahnine Davis, the UK’s leading expert on adultification and the director of Listen Up, a company established to amplify lesser heard voices in child safeguarding research, practice, and policy, welcomed the IOPC’s attention on adultification and its recognition of its detrimental effects on children, as well as its impact on police safeguarding responsibilities.
“My organisation has delivered adultification training to forces nationwide. Attitudes and beliefs can and do change,” she said. “However, lasting change requires a fundamental shift towards prioritising the welfare of children in all interactions. A child first approach is needed, especially for black children who are more likely to experience the harsh consequences of this bias. It is as much a children’s rights issue as it is a safeguarding one.”
A spokesperson for Black Lives Matter UK said: “These revised guidelines appear to be in response to the furore generated by the strip-search of Child Q in 2020. Training on ‘adultification bias’ is a paltry response to the seriousness of this case. The strip-search of children is a form of sexual assault, and this was a missed opportunity to ban the practice for good.”
The campaign group pointed to a statistic that almost 50% of children strip-searched in London were black, highlighting what they described as “the racialised nature of this form of state violence”.
The group added: “Four years on, Child Q is still haunted by her experience with the police. The IOPC’s new package will not prevent future traumatisation of children through strip-search. Rather, half-measures like this still leave space for police to make so-called mistakes, which can traumatise children for life.”
