Girls As Young As 12 Were Strip-Searched By Australian Police

Girls as young as 12 have been strip-searched by the police in Australia’s most populous state in recent years, according to data released on Wednesday, a revelation that spurred new criticism of a tactic frequently used to hunt for drugs at places like music festivals.

The police minister for the state of New South Wales, David Elliott, acknowledged that officers had not always abided by standard procedures in conducting strip searches of children, which are legal if the circumstances are urgent and a parent or guardian is present.
But he said that if drugs were uncovered in the process, parents would nonetheless be happy. “I’ve got young children, and if I thought that the police felt that they were at risk of doing something wrong, I’d want them strip-searched,” he said.
Civil liberties advocates strenuously disagreed. They called the searches an invasive overstep of paternalistic police powers that leave psychological trauma. They also said laws allowing the tactic reflected a zero-tolerance drug policy that is doing more harm than good.
“It’s the only form of legislation that allows an adult to tell a young child to take off all their clothes,” said Samantha Lee, the head of the Police Accountability Practice at the Redfern Legal Center, which obtained the data through a freedom of information request. “If it was any other circumstance, the law would come down hard and heavy.”
From mid-2016 to mid-2019 in New South Wales, a state of 7.5 million people, 122 girls under the age of 18 were strip-searched in places outside police stations. Among them were two 12-year-olds and eight 13-year-olds. Searches of boys were not included in the data.
The new statistics follow months of increasing scrutiny of the growing practice of strip searches by police officers. From mid-2005 to mid-2018, such searches in New South Wales, which includes Sydney, increased almost twentyfold. In about two-thirds of cases, the police did not find illegal drugs.
While strip searches occur in most of Australia, festivals in New South Wales have become infamous for them, with police officers often patrolling with drug detection dogs. But critics said that such searches, which have also occurred at parks and train stations, should not be routinely conducted for the relatively minor offense of drug possession.
"It’s highly likely the vast majority of strip searches are being conducted unlawfully,” said Vicki Sentas, a senior law lecturer at the University of New South Wales who has researched strip-searching statistics.
In an inquiry conducted last month by the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, a 16-year-old girl who attended a festival said she was asked to squat and cough in front of a police officer. She had no drugs.
“I could not stop crying. I was completely humiliated,” she said, according to her complaint. An officer who worked at the festival admitted that some of the searches he conducted may have been unlawful.
Mark Speakman, the state’s attorney general, said that strip searches in general were an “important investigative tool” but that the police needed to “get the balance right.”
Tyson Koh, the leader of Keep Sydney Open, a political party critical of strip searches at festivals, said it was time to scrutinize such arguments.
“For the longest time, people have been willing to put up with it because it’s been sold as being for the greater good,” Mr. Koh said. “More people are really starting to question police and government in these situations.”
Ms. Lee, of the Redfern Legal Center, has called for changes to legislation that would specify under which circumstances strip searches could occur and require court orders for children to be searched.
“The problem has been left to fester for many years,” she said. “It’s time the police force caught up.”