Imagine being 15, at school, on your period. Police officers make you remove your clothing. Your mum does not know. No other adult is in the room. They find no drugs. That was Child Q. That was December 2020. A new report from the Children’s Commissioner confirms it was never a one-off.
Recently, Dame Rachel de Souza published her fourth report on strip searches of children by police across England and Wales. The findings are damning. Black children are now almost eight times more likely to face a strip search than white children. A pattern that has survived years of reports, promises and pledges is still very much alive.
What the Report Actually Found
Between January 2018 and June 2024, police carried out almost 3,400 strip searches on children across England and Wales. The youngest child was eight years old. Shockingly, 30 per cent of those searches targeted children who had already been strip-searched before.
The racial disparity is the most alarming part. Black children are almost eight times more likely to be strip-searched than white children, and around five times more likely than Asian children. Officers also used force in nearly one in five stop and searches of children, reaching for handcuffs, firearms and Tasers. Black children were almost five times as likely to have force used against them during a search. When officers justified that force, they more often cited a Black child’s size or build as the reason.
Read that again. A child’s size. As justification for pointing a Taser at them.
The Child Q Case and What Happened Next
Child Q was a Black 15-year-old schoolgirl strip-searched by Metropolitan Police officers at her Hackney school in December 2020. She was menstruating. No appropriate adult was present. Officers did not inform her mother. They found no drugs. An independent report later concluded that racism was a likely factor in the decision to search her.
In June 2025, a disciplinary panel finally dismissed two of the officers for gross misconduct. The panel chair said their actions caused “enormous harm” to Child Q and seriously damaged public trust in policing within Black communities. It took nearly five years to get there. The Children’s Commissioner is now asking why the system that allowed it still exists.
The Numbers That Should Make Everyone Uncomfortable
The Children’s Commissioner’s report found that in 43 per cent of cases where officers used force during a stop and search, they took no further action against the child. Police strip searches of children have fallen by an estimated 56 per cent since 2020. Dame Rachel warns, though, that this decline is “masking” ongoing safeguarding failures rather than fixing them.
