Content warning: This episode contains discussions that some listeners may find distressing
The controversial practice of child strip searches was thrown into the spotlight in 2020, after the shocking case of Child Q, a 15-year-old Black girl who was strip searched at her London school by police officers who wrongly suspected her of being in possession of cannabis.
In August this year, a damning report from the Children’s Commissioner found that, between 2018 and mid-2023, police forces in England and Wales carried out more than 3,300 strip searches on children. Of these, one in 20 did not comply with strict rules for the practice, such as the need to have an appropriate adult present.
Following months of reporting on disproportionality in Avon and Somerset Police’s use of stop and search powers, Cable journalist Sean Morrison was this month leaked a confidential report that showed the scale of the problem in the region over the past seven years. He reckons the report was never meant to see the light of day.
The sensitive report revealed the so-called ‘super users’ of stop and search in Bristol, and the officers who prolifically and disproportionately target Black people. It showed that, between 2017 and the end of last year, Black people were subjected to a full strip search almost 25 times more frequently than White people; Black children alone were 10 times more likely to experience one of these searches.
In this week’s episode of the Debrief, Sean sits down with host Priyanka Raval to discuss how he came to receive the report, what it contains, and what its findings say about institutional racism in the police force. What have the police done with the findings? How have they acted, if at all, to address the disparity that is so clear in the report?
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Racist and traumatising: inside a Section 60 suspicionless stop and search operation
Officers searched innocent children, disproportionately targeted people of colour and undermined their anti-racism reforms during a 48-hour police operation in February. Their narrative that it was an effective knife-crime deterrent, done with consent, is misleading.
