Before December 2020, Child Q, a 15-year-old black schoolgirl from Hackney, was top of her class. Praised every day for her good work and good conduct, her family described her as “happy-go-lucky” and “bubbly” – she was even a prefect in her year.
This was until one day in December, when she was taken out of an exam and strip searched by the Met police while on her period, without adult supervision. Forced to strip naked, spread her legs and use her hands to spread her buttock cheeks, the police did not even allow her to go to the toilet to clean up afterwards.
Why? Because her teachers wrongly suspected she smelled of cannabis.
After no drugs were found, the officers made her reuse the same bloody pad and she was sent back to sit the rest of her exam, traumatised, violated and shaken.
Since then, her life has collapsed. From top of the class, her mother told investigators she is now a timid recluse who self-harms and needs therapy. She barely eats, and spends much of her time sleeping in the bath.
The details of the ordeal, which emerged on Tuesday from a child safeguarding review initiated by Hackney council, are stomach-churning. How this could possibly have been allowed to happen, this utter humiliation inflicted on a 15-year-old child in the middle of a school day, is unfathomable. She was failed in every way a child could possibly be failed, her life carelessly destroyed at the hands of the very adults who were supposed to protect her.
The questions for the Met and for her school are endless. Why was she suspected to be in possession of cannabis? Who authorised a strip search? Why did none of her teachers step in? Why, when a teacher smells cannabis, is the appropriate response to deploy four police officers to an exam hall?
In no uncertain terms, the report found that “had Child Q not been Black, then her experiences are unlikely to have been the same”. The investigation found racism was likely to have been an “influencing factor” in the officers’ actions, and that Child Q had been subjected to “adultification” bias – where black children are held to adult standards that their white peers are less likely to be held to. Between 2020 and 2021, 60 per cent of all children strip searched in Hackney were black. Only two of the children searched were white.
The experiences of Child Q, the latest in a disturbingly long list of scandals for the Met, beg the question – at what point is it appropriate to deem the organisation simply unfit for purpose? Was it appropriate when Charing Cross police officers were found joking about raping their female colleagues and abusing their wives? Or perhaps when the Met, again in Hackney, had to apologise and pay compensation to Dr Konstancja Duff for the use of “sexist, derogatory and unacceptable language” when she was arrested and strip-searched in 2013? Or maybe when a Met police officer raped, kidnapped and murdered Sarah Everard, or when officers took photos with the bodies of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman?
One thing is clear. This time there must be no equivocations, no distractions or platitudes from the Met. Every single person involved in this horrific ordeal must pay.
