NSW police strip-searched more than two dozen children, including a 12-year-old, in the four months to mid-February, despite a Minns government promise to review the controversial practice.
A freedom-of-information request filed by the Herald suggested that NSW Police continued strip-searching children at the same rate as before the government review was announced.
Strip-searching children, in which police direct children to remove their clothes and sometimes to lift their genitals, usually without a parent or guardian present, has been criticised by health experts for causing serious long-term trauma and harm to children’s development.
Redfern Legal Centre senior solicitor Samantha Lee said there should be a pause on all strip-searches of children while the review was ongoing.
Lee said that when she met clients who had been strip-searched as children, there was a deep level of shame and trauma that was similar to speaking to a survivor of sexual assault. Often the child never told their parents about it.
Greens justice spokeswoman Sue Higginson said strip-searching children was a policing method that did not work, given that most of the time nothing was found.
“We know that [strip-]searching is a terribly degrading exercise and a genuine violation of somebody’s dignity, and the reality is the threshold for a police officer to have the power to do that is very, very low,” Higginson said.
The FOI figures suggest police are disproportionately searching Aboriginal children. In the October-February timeframe, seven of the 26 children were Aboriginal. The 2021 census shows only one in 16 children in NSW is Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.
Source: 12ft