Mick Hartley

Many UK police forces, it seems, are now happy for transwomen officers – men – to strip search women. Stonewall will be happy, but for women it's a travesty. Jo Bartosch:

Sometimes it feels like a matter of time before I’m arrested for upsetting the sensibilities of drag queens, furries or some other marginalised, oppressed minority. And when the knock at the door does come, I hope I will be fortunate enough to be searched by an officer of the same sex. But my local force won’t guarantee this, and the chances are neither will yours. Indeed, female readers take note; should a woman being searched voice an objection to a trans-identified officer’s trouser truncheon, her words could be used in evidence against her.

Yesterday, a report titled “State Sanctioned Sexual Assault” was published by the Women’s Rights Network (WRN). It confirmed that male police officers who self-identify as transwomen have been approved to perform intimate searches on female detainees.

These findings replicate those of an investigation conducted into the NHS and police forces by the group Standing for Women (SfW) two years ago. In its recommendations, the SfW report reminded police forces that the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) states that searches must be conducted by an officer of the same sex. The duty to protect women as a sex under the Equality Act (2010) was also highlighted. Yet just six months after SfW published its research and recommendations, the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) quietly approved a policy paper which promoted gender self-identification….

The WRN report is peppered with statements from women police officers who are unhappy with the decision to allow their male colleagues to identify into searching women, who are often at the time of arrest already acutely vulnerable. One WPC, who remains unnamed, is quoted as remarking “Strip searching is very personal, and it can be really humiliating too. Everything is on show, everything is exposed. For the life of me, I can’t work out why we would want to make this even more humiliating and degrading for women”. The answer may well be found in the determined perverts who want access to women, and their dumb handbag holders within the NPCC.

At a national level, policing is in crisis. Recruitment is stalling, morale is low and public trust is waning. Yet the NPCC seems to have forgotten what the first Commissioners of Police of the Metropolis reminded officers nearly two centuries ago, that “the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval”. In pushing a policy of gender self-identification those in charge of policing are putting a divisive, ideological agenda above the needs of the public they serve, and the majority of officers in the force. Ultimately, the only people to benefit from the NPCC’s dangerously misogynist policy will be the lawyers when it hits the courts.