For quite some time I have been following the Supreme Court’s case involving the 13 year old girl who was strip searched because she was accused (falsely) of handing out prescription Advil. I haven’t written about this until now because, honestly, it upsets me too much. As the mother of a soon to be 12 year old girl I cannot imagine what I’d be capable of doing to a school administrator who had my daughter take off her clothes and pull her bra and underpants away from her body while fully clothed adults stood by and watched the show.
And it was a show. It was also, in my opinion, child abuse.
Maybe this hits me so hard because I have watched my daughter turn her privacy into an art form. She is extremely self conscious, and a little embarrassed, of her changing body. I do my best to make the process she’s going through be as normal as possible, and then she’ll do something like put on her nightgown over her clothes before removing them – performing a series of bodily contortions Houdini would envy – and the memories come rushing back. In the blink of an eye I am 12 again. I remember and understand and empathize.
As I write this I’m shaking with anger. If my child attended this school she’d be yanked out immediately. What were these adults thinking? When does strip searching a child become a-okay? And, even if you agree with it in theory, would you be capable of doing it?
Redding, an honor student who had never been in trouble before – and wasn’t this time either (read the link) – offered the best solution.
[…] On the courthouse steps after argument today, Redding is asked what she’d have wanted the school to do differently. “Call my mom first,” she says. You see, we now have school districts all around the country finding naked photos of teens and immediately calling in the police for possession of kiddie porn. Yet schools see nothing wrong with stripping these same kids naked to search for drugs. Evidently teenage nakedness is only a problem when the children choose to be naked. And the parents? They are always the last to know
Call my mom. Oh, my poor baby.
Now the case is in the hands of the Supreme Court, and if there was ever an argument for the appointment of more female justices… this is it. How Justice Ginsburg made it through the session without slapping someone – hard – I’ll never know. Let’s look at some of our brightest minds questions and comments.
Scalia: “[…] David O’Neill from the Solicitor General’s office tries to thread the needle between allowing schools to conduct daily strip searches for black sniffy markers and chilling the school district’s broad power to search for dangerous contraband. He wants the court to impose a higher standard before schools may conduct a strip search but gets into trouble with Scalia, who wonders what happens after “you search the student’s outer garments, and you have a reasonable suspicion that the student has drugs.” Scalia’s almost chortling when he exclaims, “You’ve searched everywhere else. By God, the drugs must be in her underpants!”
Breyer: “[…] This leads Justice Stephen Breyer to query whether this is all that different from asking Redding to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes,” because, “why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?”
Ginsburg: “This leads Ginsburg to sputter—in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice—”what was done in the case … it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear! They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out!” Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.”
Is this where the war on drugs has brought us? Are we really, as a nation, okay with strip searching 13 year old students? And can we please get more women on the Court? Justice Ginsburg appears to be surrounded by swaggering frat boys who are all atwitter about bra and pantie jokes.