The NSW Police practice of strip-searching girls as young as 12 and 13 is a travesty of law and order that must stop.Data obtained by the Redfern Legal Centre revealed three primary-school-aged girls and six 13-year-old girls were strip-searched. Interventions on those under 17 years old jumped from seven incidents to 25 between 2021-22 and 2022-23. Boys under the age of 17 were subjected to strip-searches 44 times and 31 times over the same periods.
We welcome the review. Justice advocates have long claimed the police powers were ill-defined and overly broad. But Associate Professor Liz Scott, from Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Centre Youth Model, skewered the real import of the latest statistics, saying that forcing children to take off their clothes in front of officers was “draconian and totally heavy-handed … the numbers for this type of intervention should be going down, not up”.
NSW Police have been taking heat on strip-searches for decades but appear to regard them as normal procedure. In 2019, a study by UNSW researchers found that the number of strip-searches carried out by police had increased 20-fold since 2006. The report not only highlighted that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were being strip-searched unlawfully in humiliating circumstances, but found only 30 per cent of strip searches resulted in criminal charges.
The gung-ho police attitude sits uncomfortably against the increasing liberalisation of drug laws, especially when the Minns government gets around to holding its promised drug summit.The law says that, outside of police stations, strip-searches are such an intrusive and humiliating procedure that they should only be used in “urgent, serious” circumstances.
Everyone wants police to have the investigative powers they need to catch criminals, but the other side of the coin is that police are most effective when they have the support of the community, and strip-searching children is bad policing.– Since the Herald was first published in 1831, the editorial team has believed it important to express a considered view on the issues of the day for readers, always putting the public interest first.