THE POLICE WILL SEXUALLY ASSAULT YOUR CHILD
- 8 hours ago
- 7 min read
By Cathy Larkman
So you receive a call. It’s from the police. Your 14 year old daughter has been arrested. They think she has drugs on her and intend to strip search her. There is a social worker with her as an appropriate adult. Yes, all this is bad enough, but there’s more. She will be strip searched by two male police officers because your 14 year old daughter has been going through a phase where she ‘presents as a male’.
This may seem like an unlikely scenario because the law clearly states that such searches must be carried out by an officer of the same sex only.
Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s exactly what Merseyside police have put into practice.
Ironically, they have done this following their own review into improving practices relating to child searches, following a previous traumatic child strip search that provoked public outrage. And they aren’t the only police force to do so either. Our police forces have lost sight of the law, and been overtaken by ideological fanatics.
We expect the police to follow the law and protect us. We certainly don’t want them to abuse their powers, or to be influenced by ideology. We want our police officers to act impartially and professionally and ‘without fear or favour’.
Young girls, who are growing up in a society with increasing numbers of predatory males targeting them, need to know that the police officers they may turn to will have these high standards. And police leaders always reassure us that they have.
So why is the police force allowing our children to be strip searched by officers of the opposite sex?
The use of searching is a necessary, but highly intrusive tactic used by police officers, both after arrest when a person is in custody, but also when a member of the public is suspected of carrying controlled drugs, weapons, or items used for criminal purposes. Searching might be needed in order to protect the person being searched, it can prevent crime, and it can stop other members of the public being exposed to wider harm too. Its use is carefully regulated under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, particularly so when it comes to strip searching, which necessitates the removal of clothing exposing intimate parts of the body. These searches must be completed out of public view and only in the presence of an officer of the same sex as the person searched. In the case of children, an ‘appropriate adult’ must be present too.
The consequences of getting this wrong are devastating. In December 2020, a 15 year old girl, referred to as ‘Child Q’ was strip searched at her school by two police officers, when staff expressed their concerns and suspicions that she was carrying cannabis.
This child, for a 15-year-old is indeed a child, had no appropriate adult present as is required by law, and was also menstruating. She was made to remove her underwear and to bend over exposing her genital area. No drugs were found. The resulting outcry in 2022 later lead to the dismissal of the two Metropolitan police officers involved for gross misconduct.
Child Q’s comments afterwards, released via her solicitors, cut to the very heart of the impact of this unlawful and undignified police overreach upon her;
“Someone walked into the school, where I was supposed to feel safe, took me away from the people who were supposed to protect me and stripped me naked, while on my period."
“I can’t go a single day without wanting to scream, shout, cry or just give up. I don’t know if I’m going to feel normal again. But I do know this can’t happen to anyone, ever again".
The understandable fury and concern arising from this led to a series of reviews by Dame Rachel de Souza, the Children’s Commissioner for England.[1] The Metropolitan police service, scorched by the criticism, rushed to review its child searching practices and to issue new guidance for officers. And of course, there were the usual platitudes of ‘lessons have been learnt’.
But they weren’t the only force to do so. Merseyside police were found by Dame Rachel, to have carried out 150 strip-searches of children aged between eight and 17 years old from 2018 to mid-2022. And this force, under its Chief Constable Rob Carden also scrambled to carry out a review of its practices in light of the understandable national concern. So were the lessons actually being learnt?
In February 2025, a representative of the Women’s Rights Network, made a request under the Freedom of Information Act to several police forces for “any internal work, research and evaluation regarding strip searching, carried out in response to the issues raised, and learning from, from the Child Q incident”. Responses quickly came in from all the forces involved, but Merseyside’s response[2] was odd to say the least, providing only the following short comment;
“Merseyside Police, on receipt of the Children’s Commissioners recommendations following the review of the treatment of Child Q, instigated an independent review of our practises and are ensuring the recommendations and findings are implemented through an action plan. The action plan is waiting for approval and to be signed off by the Command Team”.
Further correspondence with them promised the action plan by April 2025 at the latest, but that didn’t transpire. And when challenged, the staff member providing the information denied that there was any internal material, other than the still withheld action plan, despite originally claiming that the force had carried out an ‘independent review’. All correspondence chasing them up was then completely ignored.
What were they hiding?
Well, now we know. And we can guess why they were so reluctant to disclose it.
After a successful appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office and the issue of a compliance notice to the force, the action plan was eventually produced over a year later, along with an apology.
The really shocking part of that action plan is recorded here:
“All searches in custody are conducted by officers the same sex as the DP. This is documented on the CR and forms part of the SS review. Trans policy now in being to support this. In essence how the child is presenting and how they predominantly live their life is how they will be treated. Part transition is a case by case assessment”.
(CR – Custody record, SS – Strip search, DP – detained person)
Put simply, this means that Merseyside police will arrange for a male officer to strip your daughter naked and peer up her genital area, if she is ‘presenting’ as a boy, and is ‘living her life’ as a boy.
The fact that she remains female no matter what clothes she wears, what hobbies she has, or what she calls herself, will make no difference to that.
A parent may think they can stop all this as the required ‘appropriate adult’ of course, but what if social services are there in this function? Will they stop this abuse of power, and exploitation of a young girl’s confusion about her sense of ‘identity’? Or will they just go along with it?
And the same applies to your son too. If he tells them he is living as a girl, he may be stripped by a female officer.
Of course, all of this is an offensive nonsense. The police should not be applying highly contested adult ideologies to children, they should be protecting them instead. Protection means an officer of the same sex searching them, in a sensitive and professional manner, and only when absolutely necessary. Protecting them means realising that a child cannot possibly consent to what is essentially an unlawful search and is therefore a sexual assault on them.
Unfortunately, this is not the only time that the police have become somewhat giddy on gender ideology and imposed it on policies and practices, conveniently ignoring the law they are meant to uphold.
In 2022, the Women’s Rights Network exposed a decision made by the police chiefs of forces across the UK to allow opposite sex strip searching in contravention of the law, and to criminalise any woman who dared object. Scores of WRN women wrote to their Chief Constables to object and this was written about in our report State Sanctioned Sexual Assault[3]. The decision was withdrawn by the National Police Chiefs Council in January 2024 after an embarrassing exposure in a Home Affairs Select Committee and the EHRC letting them know it was likely to be unlawful (as we had been telling them all along).
But national police leaders then came back for another crack at it. In May 2025, they responded to the historic Supreme Court judgment made the previous month at the High Court in London, which clarified that sex was always biological sex, with their ‘Draft Interim Guidance on Searches of the Transgender Community’[4] This document, known to have already been adopted by most police forces, allows members of the public to request to be searched by an officer of the opposite sex, if that officer consents to do so. By consenting of course, that officer would step outside of the current legislation protecting them.
Bizarrely, that Interim Guidance also allows for the prospect of ‘half and half searching’ where a male prisoner, for instance, can ask for a male officer to search their bottom half and for a female officer to search their top half. And vice versa. And various combinations thereof. Perhaps the simplest example would be a so called ‘transgender woman’ who has retained his penis, wanting his bottom half to be searched by a male officer, but his top half with hormone induced ‘breasts’ to be searched by a female officer.
Whatever the combination, it is a recipe for coercion and pressure on young officers, regardless of the pretensions of their senior leaders. It’s also a recipe for sexually predatory behaviour.
This Interim Guidance makes no distinction between adults being searched, and children being searched, so applies to all age groups.
Little wonder then, that Merseyside failed to consider the protection that children so clearly need, when national police leaders have also taken leave of their safeguarding senses and are allowing this.
I am minded again of the words of Dame Rachel De Souza when it comes to strip searching.
“Too often police are forgetting that children are children. The primary duty of the police, as with all other professionals, should be to safeguard them from harm[5]”.
Sadly it seems that children now need to be safeguarded from the police.
