(Hackney North and Stoke
Newington) (Lab):...As we have heard, Sistah Space has done
tremendous work gathering all these thousands of signatures.
Sistah Space has existed since 2015, but many of the women
associated with it have been active in the community for much
longer than that. The last time I saw some of them, last weekend,
we were out campaigning on child
q I will just say a few sentences on child
q because that case reflects some of the
institutional racism that Valerie’s law is meant to address.
One thing that has emerged in the work and campaigning sufferers
have done on the case is the wholly disproportionate number of
black children who are strip searched in London. We have some
figures available, but I would say that they are almost certainly
an underestimate. What strikes me in listening to accounts of
what happened to child
q is that the police came and strip searched
her—and they did not just strip search her, they treated her
physically in an extremely degrading way—and then went back to
the station. They did not tell their sergeant and or anybody. For
them, it was all in a day’s work. That they were so casual about
that extremely degrading strip search tells me that they have
done it more often than the official figures reflect. I have
still not had it explained to me why there are teachers in
Hackney who think that the appropriate thing to do if they think
they smell cannabis on a school child is not to let the parents
know, but to call the police, and that that will deal with the
issue. There is a lot more to say about child
q and I am sure that the opportunity to do so will
come up in this Parliament...
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