During the search, Kate is repeatedly asked, and denies, having any drugs on her. One of the officers comments on Kate’s tampon before deciding against asking her to remove it. It’s been seven years, but the scene is etched vividly in her mind.
“It was just really dehumanising,” said Kate, a pseudonym this masthead has agreed to use to protect her privacy.
“It was really disempowering. I couldn’t tell them I wasn’t feeling safe, I wasn’t feeling comfortable, because in their eyes I was a criminal.”
When the search was over, the officers confiscated Kate’s ticket and kicked her out of the festival. She left alone, caught a train home and collapsed on her bed. No drugs were found on her.
“They didn’t even tell me it was going to be a strip-search,” she said. “It was just one clothing piece after another. I was just full-blown naked.”
For Kate, the incident reopened wounds she had tried to heal.
Just over a year earlier, when Kate was 17, two men cornered her in a small room, closed the door behind them, and sexually assaulted her.
