Strip Search on Black Children: Institutional Racism, Sexual Violence, and Blackness

By Yasmin Ibrahim

2023, Liberty Investigates (LI) released a report which reveals that Black girls are three times more likely to be subjected to the most invasive strip search with Black people making up nearly half of all Metropolitan Police (Met) strip searches of female children and teenagers. In the UK, the Met faces long-standing accusations of institutional racism. The recent report re-invokes the plight of Blackness, particularly the underage fungible subjecthood of Black girls and their plight within the institutional culture of the Met. This paper, delving critically into the LI report and the unfortunate Child Q incident, reviews the bodies of Black female children and teenagers as sites of unmitigated transgression, disciplining and violence symbolizing the ‘spirit-murder’ of the child’s psyche and its relationality to Afro- pessimism.

Social Identities, July 2025.