Have you ever been strip searched? I have. The date it happened – 7 September 2020 – is etched on my mind. That morning, as part of a security sweep on HMP Wandsworth’s H Wing, a group of male and female officers ‘span’ my cell. With the door closed, the women left, and one of the officers asked me to remove my vest, then shorts, then boxers. Next, they asked me to squat, while one of the men bent down and shone a torch at my anus. I felt vulnerable. My knees shook. When he said: ‘Sorry mate, I promise you this is worse for me than it is for you’, I felt a little better. I think I even laughed. But if a woman had been present I would have felt far more humiliated.
Fortunately the law is clear about how such searches should take place. Section 55 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) says: ‘A constable may not carry out an intimate search of a person of the opposite sex’.
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