Police strip-searched a 15-year-old black girl at school. When will these abuses end?

[Judi Lynn]

Diane Abbott

Wed 16 Mar 2022 08.29 EDT

The revelation that a black schoolgirl was strip-searched by police at school in Hackney, east London, after teachers claimed that they smelt marijuana on her, is shocking. But the details of the search, the indignities inflicted on a 15-year-old girl, are truly distasteful.

She was made to strip naked, to spread her legs, to use her hands to spread her buttock cheeks and then to cough. She was menstruating. According to family members, the police insisted that she take off the bloody pad and would not let her go to the toilet to clean up. Then they made her reuse the same pad.

No drugs were found, yet the rumour spread around the school that this perfectly innocent girl was a drug dealer. Her mother told the local child safeguarding review that the experience had left her daughter traumatised. Her aunt added: “I see the change from a happy-go-lucky girl to a timid recluse that hardly speaks to me.” She said the girl was now in therapy and that she self-harms.

It would be easy to dismiss the 2020 incident as an aberration, to believe that the police officers involved were the proverbial “bad apples”. After the damning review, the Met has voiced public contrition, calling the strip search “truly regrettable” and apologising “to the child concerned, her family and the wider community.”

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/16/police-strip-search-black-girl-school-east-london-racism-misogyny

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[RKP5637]

2. Cops are consistently out of control anymore. n/t

[Jarqui]

3. They'll end when the perpetrators are consistently

and authoritatively held harshly to account for their crimes.

What is the penalty for a group of black men to strip search a white woman in a similar manner with similar consequences (rumor she is a drug dealer, etc)?

[Haggis 4 Breakfast]

4. How, in the name of God, can something like this be allowed to transpire ?

Screw the "truly regrettable" and "apologising" by the peelers. This is disgusting and inhuman. Women in London should take to the streets by the thousands.

Do they not have laws to protect children over there from obscene abuse by men on a power ego-trip ?

That child will NEVER be the same after this. And she will certainly NEVER trust law enforcement again.

[Judi Lynn]

5. I still can't get past just hearing this event happened. How can that young woman?

Just having to discuss it with anyone to explain what happened has put a knife in the back of the relationship. Her mother notes it has devastated the communication she and her daughter once shared, crushed the young one's spirit. That's not going to simply fade away for a very long time.

Undoubtedly the child imagines that the image, once summoned by mentioning it will place that experience in the mom's mind in a way the child would NEVER want anyone to envision her, in her utter helplessness, not to mention an awareness of her experience she would rather die than reveal to anyone who didn't care for her as much as her mother.

What a shame there isn't anything a hypnotist could do to simply erase that memory from her mind, altogether. It will take so much time, if it ever can be fully put behind her.

Days after reading the article, I still feel like crying, myself. How could anyone be that deliberately cruel?