Black children still far more likely to face police strip searches, report finds

Black children in England and Wales remained far more likely than White children to be subjected to police strip searches, even as the overall number of searches on children fell. The Children’s Commissioner for England found 457 strip searches of children in the year from July 2022 to June 2023, roughly one every 19 hours, and said Black children were still four times more likely to be searched than their share of the population would predict.

The gap was even wider in earlier analysis. In data covering 2018 to 2022, Black children were up to six times more likely to be strip-searched than White children. That same study found more than 2,840 children had been strip-searched, some as young as eight, and more than half of those searches took place without an appropriate adult present, despite that being a legal safeguard except in serious-risk cases. In the latest analysis, nearly half of child strip searches ended with no further action.

The figures point to a practice that remains concentrated on Black children despite repeated promises of reform. Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner, said the pattern showed system-wide failings, including poor record-keeping, minimal scrutiny and inconsistent safeguarding. The concern is not just the number of searches, but the repeated use of a highly intrusive power with little evidence of a result and too little oversight over when it is used.

The issue became a national scandal after the strip search of Child Q, a 15-year-old Black schoolgirl, at a school in Hackney in December 2020. That case triggered multiple investigations, a safeguarding review by Hackney Council, parliamentary scrutiny and changes to police guidance. But the latest response from the Independent Office for Police Conduct suggested the underlying problem had not gone away. The IOPC said Black children were almost eight times more likely to be strip-searched than White children, and that almost 30 percent of child strip searches involved children who had been strip-searched before.

The IOPC has made 10 nationwide recommendations to the Home Office, the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing, pressing for stronger protections and tighter safeguarding. The government later launched a consultation on further safeguards, including a requirement to notify parents or guardians when a child is strip-searched. The latest data sits within a broader pattern of ethnic inequality in policing: Home Office stop-and-search statistics for the year ending 31 March 2023 recorded 529,474 stop and searches in England and Wales, with 24.5 for every 1,000 Black people compared with 5.9 for every 1,000 White people.