New figures show more than 120 girls in New South Wales have been told to remove their clothes by officers over the past three years.
The youngest were two 12-year-olds, while eight 13-year-olds were also searched.
“In two-thirds of these strip searches, nothing was found on the young women, which means these strip searches were completely unnecessary,” Redfern Legal Centre’s Samantha Lee said.
Police Minister David Elliott affirmed his support for the strip-searching of children, however, claiming that children as young as 10 have been involved in terrorism.
“I’ve got young children and if I thought that the police felt they were at risk of doing something wrong, I’d want them strip searched,” he said.
“No child should be pulled off the street by uniformed police, taken to a secret location and then strip searched,” said Greens MP David Shoebridge in response. “That is about as close as you get to state-sanctioned sexual assault and it should not be happening.”
Read the full article here (TV NZ, 10 November 2019)
