In March 2022 the revelation that a 15-year-old black school-girl was subject to a traumatising police strip search, while in school, ignited widespread fury and disgust. The schoolgirl – Child Q – was on her period at the time the search took place in 2020 and was searched without an appropriate adult present. Her experience was reviewed by the City and Hackney Safeguarding Children’s Partnership, who published a report into the findings in March 2022. The treatment of Child Q exposes the racist British police force and racism within education. The review states clearly that ‘racism … was likely to have been an influencing factor in the decision to undertake a strip search’, that ‘the strip search of Child Q should never have happened and there was no reasonable justification for it’ and that Child Q had ‘undoubtedly suffered harm’.
In December 2020 four police officers were called to a secondary school in Hackney, London. Teachers believed that they could smell cannabis on Child Q and had already carried out a search of her bag, blazer, scarf and shoes which found ‘nothing of significance’. Two female police officers then took Child Q to the medical room where she was strip searched. She was forced to remove her sanitary pad, made to bend over, spread her legs and use her hands to spread her buttocks and cough while her teachers stood outside. No appropriate adult was in the room during the search and no parent or family member was contacted at any point before, during, or after the search. Despite asking several times, Child Q was not allowed to go to the toilet, and despite having been subjected to the most degrading treatment, was offered no follow-up care or support and was sent back into her exam. No drugs or prohibited items were found. The trauma of this incident has left the girl – who previously had been ‘top of the class’, a school prefect and described by family as ‘bubbly’ and ‘happy-go-lucky’ – self-harming, not eating, having panic attacks at school and screaming when she sees police.
It is clear Child Q was treated in this way because she is black: racial profiling trumped the in loco parentis responsibilities of her teachers and, instead of being protected, Child Q was criminalised. In racist Britain, not even schools are safe for black children. The treatment of Child Q is far from an isolated incident. In the past five years over 9,000 children have been strip-searched in London alone, with black children three times more likely to be subjected to the shameful practice. Between 2020 and 2021, 25 children in Hackney were strip-searched with 18 of these children in handcuffs during the search – 15 (60%) were black. 88% of these searches found nothing. In 2015, a briefing note was published by Just for Kids Law and Children’s Rights Alliance for England showing that there was an alarming increase in the number of children being strip-searched and that in nearly half of cases there was no appropriate adult present. The Guardian reported the year before that 4,638 children between ages 10 and 16 had been strip-searched between 2008 and 2013.
So-called Safer School Police Officers (SSPOs) were introduced by the Labour Party in 2002; by 2020-21 there were almost 400 police officers working inside London schools. Local Labour mayors such as Andy Burnham in Manchester and Sadiq Khan in London have called for more police in schools. In 2019, then Met Commissioner Cressida Dick said she wanted police to be ‘embedded into the DNA of schools’. The metrics used to determine whether an SSPO should be assigned to a school include ‘provision of free school dinners (as an indicator of social deprivation)’, GCSE grades, crime in the area, persistent absence levels, the number of children on Pupil Premium grants and the number of children who have a social worker. It is clear the intention is to police working class children, particularly black working class children. As austerity has ravaged social services, mental health services, youth clubs and schools themselves – with class sizes growing and teaching assistant support slashed – SSPOs have replaced social and pastoral support. They oil the school-to-prison-pipeline where ‘young people travel from schools to pupil referral units and secure schools, to youth offending institutions (where half of inmates are black or minority ethnic) and, finally, to prison’ (The Guardian, September 2020).
Between 16 and 18 March 2022, protests took place across Britain. A large protest took place inside Child Q’s school, with students filling the halls and staircases. One pupil described the school as a ‘breeding ground for discrimination’, saying ‘if we can’t trust the teachers to keep us safe, this is not a school’. City and Islington sixth form college in north London also saw a mass walk-out by students, protesting against the sudden introduction of unauthorised stop and search by private security as they entered the building and in solidarity with Child Q. A weekend of protest took place outside Stoke Newington Police Station and Hackney town hall to demand all those complicit in the assault of Child Q be fired and more broadly that police are removed from schools.
Young people can take inspiration from the students at Child Q’s school and City and Islington college, as well as the pupils at Pimlico Academy who last year stood up against a racist school administration and forced the headteacher out. They can also look to the example of student activists in Los Angeles, who after months of protest forced the Board of Education to cut its in-school police officers by a third and divert the funds to improving the education of black students. Nine years of campaigning eliminated the Oakland school police department and put those funds towards counsellors and social workers. For schools to begin to meet the needs of working class and black students, to be a place of education and safety, schools must become a no-go zone for police.
Cassandra Howarth
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 287, April/May 2022
