Questions for the Met

REPORTS that an autistic 14-year-old girl was stripsearched in the presence of male Metropolitan Police officers have rightly caused outrage and alarm.

Scotland Yard confirmed the girl’s mother has made a complaint after the BBC reported that the teenager, known as ‘Olivia’, was left traumatised and tried to take her own life following the incident, in which her underwear was allegedly cut off by police. It comes after the shocking case of Child Q, a 15-year-old black girl who was removed from an exam when wrongly suspected of possessing cannabis and then strip-searched — while on her period — without an appropriate adult present.

Olivia, who is mixed-race and was also menstruating at the time, was held in custody for over 20 hours before being found to be in possession of a sharpened stick as well as a knife — something her mother says was used for self-harming and which a court later accepted.

Last month, the Standard revealed that hundreds of children — some as young as 10 — had undergone full strip searches by the Met, during which intimate parts can be exposed. The Met had no justification for the way it treated Child Q and faces hard questions over this latest case. As a matter of urgency, we need proper safeguards in place so that vulnerable young people do not face this kind of treatment at the hands of the police.