“Someone walked into the school, where I was supposed to feel safe, took me away from the people who were supposed to protect me and stripped me naked, while on my period.” These are the words of the 15-year-old black girl we now know as Child Q. In this devastating summary of her violation, Child Q makes clear what key professionals were unwilling to recognise that day: she was a child in need of safeguarding.
Two years stretched between that harrowing ordeal in 2020 and Hackney council’s report on how it could have happened; the conclusion being that “racism … was likely to have been an influencing factor in the decision to undertake the strip-search”. In August, a report by the children’s commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, found that black children made up nearly 60% of the 650 who underwent a police strip-search between 2018 and 2020. More than half of those searches resulted in no further action.
To start with Child Q’s words is to foreground the child. The initial incident, which occurred six months after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer, reminds us of what remains true: when it comes to schools and policing, black communities cannot see these institutions as being there to protect us. The data repeatedly illustrates otherwise.
Were it not for the dogged advocacy of Child Q’s family, it is possible that the public would have remained ignorant of the details. It is shameful, too, that the wheels of justice should move so slowly. Protests were mounted before a semblance of accountability could be achieved. It tells us much about which children, for both teachers and police officers, exist beyond the considerations of care and protection.
Child Q began school that day in December 2020 like any other 15-year-old. About to sit a GCSE mock exam, everything changed when a teacher, convinced she was in possession of drugs, instigated a search of her belongings. On finding nothing, the school escalated the matter. The police were called.
That such a response is disproportionate is an understatement, but then this is what black parents and activists have repeatedly alerted the public to: when it comes to policing or school sanctions, black children are at a disadvantage. Recent research found “young black men in London 19 times more likely to be stopped and searched than the general population”. Met officers are four times more likely to use force on black people compared with the white population. In some local authorities, black Caribbean children are excluded at five times the rate of their white peers.
In April this year, the then children’s commissioner, Anne Longfield, said this is the result of educators’ “adultification” of black children. Teachers (and arguably wider society) perceive black children as older than their years, and therefore less vulnerable and innocent.
I took this picture of these placards at a protest held outside Hackney town hall in March 2022. I wanted to document for myself the visceral pain and anger felt in that moment. The first placard declares, “Child Q could have been my daughter!” The second, “No to racist police.” In the top right-hand corner and the bottom left, both contain the acronym BLM: Black Lives Matter. The placards distill what had clearly been absent in the minds of professionals who dealt with Child Q.
In an interview given in 1974, the writer James Baldwin stated he “never had a childhood”. As if to emphasise his point, he added, “I was born dead.” It is hard to read those words and not think of how black children are at the mercy of a society that refuses to see their full, vulnerable humanity.
Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and writer focusing on race, politics, education and feminism
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