Juvenile Justice
Should children be strip searched at juvenile detention centers?
By Scott Wasserman
Apr 4, 2007, 10:40

A Sacramento attorney filed a lawsuit against Alameda County, California. alleging that its juvenile detential officers illegally strip searched the teens in their custody. The teens had not been arrested for possession of drugs or weapons, and there was no reasonable suspicion that the strip search would discover anything illegal.

The juvenile detention center where I practice juvenile law in Johnson County, Kansas routinely strip searches every child who enters the facility. The teens are forced to bend over and open their buttocks so that a staff member may check the anus for contraband. Juvenile justice jurisdiction in Kansas begins at age ten.

I suspect that these searches rarely find anything worth the trauma to the child. Most of the youth in juvenile detention suffer from mental illness. Some already have been sexually traumatized.

The "searches" are inflicted immediately upon entering the facility as a traumatic rite of initiation. They intentionallly dehumanize the child.

Strip searches serve the same function as rape and torture. In each instance, the perpetrator inflicts sexual trauma to demonstrate the abuser's power and dehumanize the victim.

I'm not accusing our juvenile detention center of rape or torture. Fortunately, our juvenile detention center has a great staff. They do everything they can to minimize the trauma. The searchers must be the same gender as the victim, and the search must be wintessed by another person of that same gender.

Nonetheless, the many juveniles I have represented over the years have understood all too well the dehumanizing meaning of this horrific hazing. I'm complaining about the process, not the personnel. Strip searches intentionally traumatize the victim to establish authority. They should stop.