Child Q: Labour pledges mandatory rules around strip searching children
Joe Lepper
Thursday, September 29, 2022
The Labour Party has promised to introduce mandatory rules and safeguards around the strip searching of children by police officers, should it win the next general election.
The move comes following a case earlier this year in which a 15-year-old girl, referred to as Child Q, was strip searched by police at her school in London while on her period, after being wrongly accused of possessing drugs.
At this week’s Labour Party conference shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Labour will strengthen police standards – overhauling training, vetting and misconduct procedures.
“And new mandatory rules and safeguards on the strip searching of children so that an awful case like that of Child Q, a black teenage girl in East London can never happen again.”
Analysis released by children’s commissioner for England Rachel de Souza last month found that 650 children were strip searched by Metropolitan police officers between 2018 and 2020. A quarter of these children were aged between 10 and 15.
The Labour Party will also bring in “a new law to crackdown on criminals who lure young people into violence” by outlawing “the exploitation of children for crime”, said Cooper in her speech.
Young people at risk of exploitation will also be offered more support, involving mental health professionals, police and schools, she pledged.
Labour will rebuild neighbourhood policing with a new £360m programme to put 13,000 more police & PCSOs into dedicated community teams.
— Yvette Cooper (@YvetteCooperMP) September 27, 2022
After 12 Tory yrs, the police are so overstretched, when things go wrong, too often no one comes.
My speech to #Lab22 https://t.co/WMNci0BVOX pic.twitter.com/qracwSgNGD
In her conference speech Cooper also promised to “act on the epidemic of violence against women and girls".
She warned that more than 300 women are raped each day, “of those around 190 rapes will be reported” and “only three rapists will see the inside of a court room, never mind a prison cell”.
In addition, she pledged to “deliver specialist support for victims” by placing domestic abuse victims in 999 emergency control rooms. All police forces will set up “rape investigation teams” she added.
The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has recommended police officers focus on the best interests and safeguarding needs of children when deciding on whether to carry out a strip search.
Also, an appropriate adult must be present during the search, unless “a valid exception exists”.
The guidance was issued as it emerged that 11 referrals around strip searching had been made to the police watchdog this year. Two of the cases, both involving 16 year old boys, are being independently investigated.
