The inquiry heard that the teenager was lining up to enter the Byron Bay music festival last year when a sniffer dog sat down next to her and a female police officer ordered her to “put your hands where I can see them and don’t reach for anything”.
She said she was escorted away with her hands in the air and she could hear other revellers saying out loud that police “had someone”.
“I was really scared,” she said.
The teenager said that while this was happening she was asked how old she was, to which she replied that she was 16.
The incident is now the subject of a hearing in which strip-search practices are set to be scrutinised more generally.
“I was absolutely shocked the police would do this to me,” the teenager said.
Counsel assisting the commissioner, Peggy Dwyer, who read the statement on the teenager’s behalf, said a strip-search was “by necessity a grave intrusion of a citizen’s privacy and dignity”.
“Absent any legal justification, it would constitute an assault, and I anticipate that the commission will hear that it is capable of causing great distress and lasting harm,” Dr Dwyer said during her opening address.
NSW Police data obtained by Redfern Legal Centre this year showed that almost 300 children were strip-searched in the field over a two-year period between the financial years 2016-17 and 2017-18, with the youngest person subjected to the procedure being ten.
Read the full article here (Australia News Today, 21 October 2019)
