Stripping Away Child Rights (and clothes) In The Name Of Our War On Drugs
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.
Tags: Supreme Court, War on Drugs
Being an educator in a former life, I know girls of that age loathe getting changed for gym.
Ginsburg has a point; the other 8 SCJs think a girls locker room is like the one in Porky’s.
I think these “zero tolerance” policies have to go, for one. This case is disgusting, and the decision is worse. Perhaps we can get Congress to address this problem?
If I were the girl’s parent, I would be at the police station charging the teachers with sexual molestation.
This should have been the question for Miss California.
Since it’s not a big deal, the Supremes should all preside over their next oral arguments in their skivvies.
That poor little girl is absolutely right – why wasn’t her mother called? Why didn’t she demand that her mother be called? I’m with you, Pandora. I would immediately remove my child from that school. The judgment of the school adminstrators is beyond poor and speaks volumes about their (in)ability to do their job. And what an important job they have. They should be ashamed and forced to resign!
I shudder when I think of an adult, in a position of authority, ordering a 13 year old girl to strip. That little girl will be scarred for life.
And the school administers, imo, should not be allowed to work with children again. What they did (and still do?) was sick.
Not that I am defending what happened, but being a school administrator has got to be the most thankless job in the world.
Zero tolerance is a synonym for utter lack of judgement.
The drug in question was presecription-strength Ibuprofin and not something with any ‘street value’. How many non-prescription variants of the pill would it take to have the same analgesic effect?
What punishment was given to the student who made the false accusation?
Perhaps it is time to dump the hacks who infest our boards of education. These are the ones taking the anti-common sense position.
There is a justifiable war on major trade in dangerous drugs. Yet how many news reports do we see where a small quantity of pot is deemed ‘for distribution’ and assigned some ludicrous ‘street value’. I suppose that such arrests help some police officers make their arrest quotas.
I suppose that such arrests help some police officers make their arrest quotas.
Oh, it’s worse than that… if you can be tagged as a distributor, then you can be charged with “maintaining a vehicle” or “maintaining a house for the purpose of distribution”, and then they can take your house and car.
“And the school administers, imo, should not be allowed to work with children again. ”
On this, we agree. In addition, had they done that to my daughter, they would have no safe haven on this planet.
Art Downs wrote:
Am I the only one who finds that Art Downs is against “zero tolerance”, when it was his side of the aisle that tired of judges and those in power being too lenient on lawbreakers. It was the Radical Right’s complaints that brought “zero tolerance” into being.
I don’t know Art, did you get approval from Fox News and the RNC before you started thinking for yourself?
Agreed, Mis. I scare myself when I put myself in that position.
And, Nemski, we are going to have to disagree when it comes to thankless jobs.
And, Nemski, we are going to have to disagree when it comes to thankless jobs.
Sounds like Mr. Pandora is in the dog house. 🙂
That may be true, but I really don’t waste my tears on school administrators who make a very good salary for what they do. When I think of thankless jobs, I think garbage men, septic tank repairers, mushroom farm workers, etc. School Administrators don’t make my top 100.
When I read articles like this, what worries me is that controversies of this nature will only prove to hurt or impair the rightful authority of school administrators.
If this really happened to the girl, I feel bad, and maybe the teachers were wrong in doing this, but I think that people have to be *real* careful at how they pick apart or attack school authority. Maybe they went overboard, but here is just a hypothetical: what if it wasn’t “prescription Advil” (which doesn’t even exist, so I’m not sure why people keep calling it that), but instead it was a weapon?
Rich,
Why don’t just strip search every student every day, that way we can make sure that none of them are carrying Advil.
First of all, Unstable Isotope, this story has so many odd holes in it that it barely makes any sense. Am I the only person who read this story and STILL can’t figure out why “Advil” would provoke any kind of investigation? Who in the heck CARES if a high school kid has Advil on him or her? When I was in high school, no one would have even cared or noticed. This story just doesn’t make sense from a lot of angles. Has Advil changed significantly since I took it in high school?
Rich, this case is at the Supreme Court level. I think the details are pretty well verified at this point. Oh, and she was innocent.
School Authority? Are you kidding? What they did to this young girl had nothing to do with academics and everything to do with authority – and they are damned lucky this wasn’t my daughter.
And I’m not playing the coulda had a weapon game. That’s the mindset that set us on the road to the Patriot Act and torture.
Here’s my viewpoint: There is absolutely no circumstance in which a school administrator may call a student into their office and have them strip. If this had happened in any other venue the adult would be in jail.
There is absolutely no circumstance in which a school administrator may call a student into their office and have them strip.
But…but…but…what if there is a ticking time bomb? What city are you willing to sacrifice? Don’t you watch “24” or whatever it is called?
Exactly, A1.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree, Pandora,
on the whole weapon aspect of this story.
I mean, I’ve seen enough stories on the news about school shootings to have grown very concerned about the safety of kids in the schools, and yet, even so, I’m against the Patriot Act.
Guess you can discard that theory about my mindset now, right?
Look, Rich, I’ve already admitted in the post that this is a very emotional issue for me. I can easily place my daughter into this situation, a situation she’d never recover from at this age.
As far as your mindset… I have no theory. What I do think is that ends don’t justify the means. I also think kids have more to fear from bullies armed with relentless taunts than weapons.
Rich,
There is a such thing as prescription Advil. It’s stronger than normal Advil.
Pandora-I am torn over this story. I’m not so sure what we may have read is THE story. The term “strip search” may have been overplayed and gotten good press. My reading relays the school nurse being the the “administrator” present for a quick shake of the undergarments and clothing the girl was wearing. I understand the vulnerability of that age group with embarassment, but certainly no more than a cursory check by a health care professional. It sounds very conflicting in interpretation, but fueled by a “passerby’s” comment. I don’t want to add to that, and diminish a true unfounded, unwarranted, unsubstantiated, unconsciouble, and unlawful strip search of a minor. Just a thought.