Roughly four in five child strip searches conducted by the Met in 2025 were for suspected drugs, which advocacy groups say is hard to reconcile with a child-first approach.
Drug suspicions accounted for 78% of cases where children were searched to the extent that ‘intimate parts’ were exposed, Metropolitan Police stop-and-search data for 2025 shows.
Youth justice advocates say this trend is difficult to square with a child-first approach, arguing that drug offences rarely involve serious enough harm to justify such an intrusive search.
Louise King, co-lead at Just for Kids Law and the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, said: “The strip search of children is traumatic and degrading.
“It violates children’s rights and these encounters raise serious concerns.”
The Met has been under heavy scrutiny over the practice since March 2022, when details emerged of gross misconduct during the strip-search of a Hackney schoolgirl — an incident her family said left the teenager struggling with anxiety and self-harm.
Following allegations at school that the 15-year-old smelled of cannabis, officers made Child Q remove her underwear and sanitary towel, bend over, spread her buttocks and cough.
No drugs were found.
Two of the officers involved were dismissed in June 2025 following an investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC).
The Children’s Commissioner for England said the problem went beyond individual personnel, with her August 2022 report finding evidence of force-wide safeguarding failures and a culture of non-compliance.
The Metropolitan Police has since pledged to improve its approach to strip-searching children, including introducing a new stop-and-search charter in February 2025.
Meanwhile, the number of child strip searches conducted by the force has fallen year on year, down 46% between 2023 and 2025.
But child rights campaigners argue that lower numbers alone do not demonstrate good safeguarding practice, especially when many of the remaining searches are motivated by drug suspicions.
Why drug-led searches raise safeguarding concerns
The Child Q case made public what safeguarding experts had long warned: strip searches can cause serious, long-lasting harm to children.
They argue strip searches can be especially harmful in drug-related cases because they risk retraumatising already vulnerable children.
The Children’s Society estimates that 4,000 London teenagers are involved in county lines, a form of child criminal exploitation in which gangs use threats, violence and manufactured debt to coerce children into moving drugs for them.
King said: “When enforcement-led responses are prioritised over safeguarding interventions, particularly in cases involving drug possession, vulnerable children risk being drawn into the criminal justice system instead of receiving the help and support they need, exacerbating their vulnerability.”
When might strip searching a child for drugs be justified?
Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza said child strip searches should only happen in the rare cases where they are absolutely necessary to prevent serious harm.
Even then, the harm being prevented should outweigh any harm caused by the search itself, according to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Children in Police Custody.
In a statement following the Child Q investigation, IOPC Director Amanda Rowe said: “[The] decision to strip search a 15-year-old at school on suspicion of a small amount of cannabis was completely disproportionate.”
Retired police officer Tess Comann* said: “Class A drugs would have to be suspected – and with intent to supply – before I even considered strip searching a child.”
The way Met strip search data is recorded makes it impossible to know which substances officers suspected in each case, or whether the grounds related to possession or supply.
However, other datasets suggest cannabis is a primary driver in similar policing contexts.
Even in child drug supply cases linked to organised crime, cannabis was cited more frequently than higher-harm drugs, according to a London Evening Standard investigation into child arrests under the Met’s county lines programme between 2022 and 2024.
This kind of pattern suggests the Met may still be strip-searching children in cases where it causes more harm than it prevents, helping to explain campaigners’ concerns about last year’s drug-heavy profile.
But even where the suspected harm might justify a strip search, the practicalities of the case may still rule it out.
Comann said that for some Class A drugs, the larger quantities associated with intent to supply are often hard to conceal in the bodily areas strip searches are designed to access.
Where consignments are too heavy or bulky to be concealed by the breasts, buttocks or external genitalia, they are often hidden in clothing or attached to larger body surfaces, meaning they can be found without exposing intimate parts.
Alternatively, individuals may resort to hiding the drugs internally by ingesting or inserting them, in which case a strip search is insufficient.
Strip searches are for visual rather than physical inspection: officers can expose intimate parts but are not permitted to make contact with them.
Police are not authorised to conduct internal searches.
This means that strip searches often become either an excessive or insufficient response.
In practice, then, multiple conditions would need to be met at once for strip-searching to be justified under a child-first approach:
- Officers must suspect a child is carrying Class A drugs.
- There needs to be intent to supply, not solely possession.
- The drug suspected must be one that, even in supply-level quantities, could plausibly be concealed in external intimate areas.
Comann said: “There is such a narrow set of cases that tick all these boxes that, in reality, these searches should be few and far between.”
Intelligence-led searches
Because a child-first approach requires suspicion to go beyond what can be observed, intelligence-led searches can indicate whether safeguards are being applied consistently.
Comann said: “You might get lucky and see a suspect stash something – maybe you even get a glimpse of the substance itself – but you can’t eyeball one substance from another and you definitely can’t see intent.
“You need intelligence for that.”
According to the UK policing inspectorate (HMICFRS), intelligence-led searches are more likely to be effective.
But in 2025, only 62.9% of child strip searches conducted by the Met for suspected drugs resulted in a positive outcome.
This rate is broadly unchanged from 2022, despite post-Child Q commitments to improve the practice.
De Souza has previously pointed to the Met’s low success rates as evidence that the force may be strip-searching children without sufficient justification.
Why have these safeguarding issues persisted?
Launching the stop-and-search charter in 2025, Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said: “The charter is not about doing less stop and search, it is about doing it better by improving the quality of encounters.”
Yet official data indicates the force may not have achieved this aim: strip searches of children are down, but the drug-driven profile and low success rate of the remaining cases suggest safeguarding principles are still not being applied consistently.
Chris Bath of the National Appropriate Adult Network said policing culture has begun to adopt child-first terms such as “trauma-informed” without a proper understanding of what they mean in practice.
A 2023 HMICFRS inspection found Met officers failed to appreciate the profound power imbalance between children and their exploiters, citing widespread victim-blaming language used to describe children as “making poor choices” or “placing [themselves] at risk”.
Former Met officer Kate Malone was sceptical that exploitation had much bearing on such cases, saying: “I’ve never come across somebody carrying drugs that hadn’t put themselves in that situation or wasn’t happy about what they were doing.”
According to Barnardo’s, some children may not recognise themselves as victims, while others are too afraid of repercussions from their exploiters to seek help.
Meanwhile, campaign group StopWatch described the 2025 charter as vague and unenforceable, accusing the Met of reducing it to a PR exercise.
King warned the law on child strip searches remained unfit for purpose, saying: “Despite government promises, reforms have been slow to materialise.”
Until then, campaigners warn the practice may continue to be used in lower-harm cases than it should, with the Met’s drug-heavy figures for 2025 only reinforcing those concerns.
The Metropolitan Police were approached for comment.
*Names changed for individuals wishing to remain anonymous.
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