Tasmanian Government must ban routine strip searching of kids

Two of Australia’s leading human rights organisations - the Human Rights Law Centre and Amnesty International Australia - are calling on the Gutwein Government to prohibit the routine strip searching of children. The Tasmanian Government is currently considering laws that the two national organisations say miss the mark when it comes to the need to protect children from harm and prohibit routine strip searches.

The proposed laws would consolidate strip search powers into one piece of legislation, but critically give too much discretion to police and prison officers, and do not provide for proper transparency and accountability. The proposed laws also do not adequately protect children from the trauma of being forced to remove their clothes again and again in front of adults.

Monique Hurley, a Senior Lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre, said that routinely strip searching children is traumatising, unjustifiable and should be prohibited in law:

“The Gutwein Government shouldn’t squander this opportunity to protect children and get the law right when it comes to banning routine strip searching. Strip searches involve forcing children as young as ten to remove their clothes in front of adult prison guards and police officers. It’s invasive, dehumanising and unnecessary and strips children of their dignity.”

The Tasmanian Government is reforming its strip search laws after strong recommendations were made by the Tasmanian Commissioner of Children and Young People last year for routine strip searching to ‘cease’, and data was obtained by the Human Rights Law Centre showing the exorbitant over-use of strip searches on children in prison.

Significant numbers of children in Tasmanian prisons have histories of child abuse or neglect. Due to the ongoing impacts of colonisation and systemic racism, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are over-represented in the Tasmanian legal system, with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people almost 4 times as likely as non-Indigenous young people to be under youth justice supervision. Previous data obtained by the Human Rights Law Centre highlighted that Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander children were significantly over-represented in strip searches.

Rodney Dillon, Indigenous Advisor at Amnesty International Australia, said:

"Indigenous people are grossly overrepresented in our jails, and that's true of the kids who are locked up. We know a child as young at 10 doesn't have the cognitive development to comprehend the consequences of their actions. Add to that the humiliation and fear induced by routine strip searches, it's just traumatising kids who should be with their families in the first place.”

"If we can finally get smart about why these kids are interacting with the justice system, we might just accept that there are better ways to manage behaviour. But those ways don't include locking little kids up and strip searching them," said Dillon.

The Human Rights Law Centre has previously argued that routine strip searches should be banned, and that children should otherwise only be strip searched pursuant to laws like those in the ACT which only permit a strip search as a last resort, in circumstances where there is reasonable intelligence which indicates that a young person is carrying something dangerous. Strip searches are then only conducted after all other less intrusive search alternatives have been exhausted, like wands or body scanners, similar to those used in airports across the country.

Read the Human Rights Law Centre’s submission, which has been endorsed by Amnesty International Australia.