‘Lessons clearly still not being learned after Child Q outrage – silence not an option’ – Darren Lewis

Darren Lewis says we should never forget the appalling Child Q case as shoolkids continue to be demeaned

Buried under the backlash over William and Kate and that slap at the Oscars is the Child Q scandal.

It is being forgotten in exactly the way the 15-year-old’s school – and the police – would prefer.

Suddenly it isn’t being spoken about on the TV and radio phone-ins any more.

Suddenly the situation that so horrified parents and anyone with a shred of human decency across the land isn’t being dissected as it would have been had she been a white child from Kensington or middle England.

Offended by that? Good. Because the truth is, young black lower-class girls and boys from places like Hackney in East London will never be important enough to get angry about.

The teachers whose bias – according to the report – drove them to wrongly suspect her of carrying cannabis, pull her out of an exam and call the police to conduct the kind of intimate search a common criminal would get in jail have been allowed to melt into the background.

The female police officers who conducted that December 2020 search – in which Child Q’s private parts were exposed, she was made to remove a sanitary pad as she was menstruating and was asked to bend over and cough – are still in their jobs.

The youngster wasn’t even allowed to go to the bathroom to clean herself and had to reapply the same dirty sanitary pad to her underwear.

It is worth repeating to underline the shocking nature of this scandal. And only now, two years on, schools across the UK are reviewing their policies on the treatment of teenagers – male and female – in this area. Why has it taken this long?

Why have we had a climate stretching into the year 2022 within which teachers have the power to demean children in this way?

It remains a disgrace that the child’s parents were not contacted. At all.

The police and governing body of the school have apologised. The girl is rightly suing.

But what is policing minister Kit Malthouse doing beyond tut-tutting and claiming the Government is taking this matter “extremely seriously”.

According to statistics from the City & Hackney Safeguarding Children Partnership, which covers the area where Child Q was searched, 25 children under 18 were subjected to strip searches by officers between 2020 and 2021.

Of those 25, 19 were male and handcuffed during the process. Nothing was found in 22 of the searches and, surprise, surprise, more than half the children searched, 60%, were black.

In 2016, the BBC reported that over 5,000 kids in England and Wales had been strip-searched between 2013 and 2015. It also found that more than 4,000 of those searches had been carried out by the Met Police. We have a scandal in plain sight that must be addressed.

Silence cannot continue to be an option.