Young people on being stripped in state custody (Youth Justice Board, 2011)
PD was a 14-year-old girl, with a history of mental illness, who had been a victim of sexual abuse. She was arrested in 2010, after being drunk and abusive outside a kebab shop, then taken in handcuffs to Wirral police station where she was forcibly stripped of all her clothes by three female officers. No one called her mother until after PD had been stripped.
The police say they stripped PD to prevent her harming herself, but CCTV footage of her after she had been stripped and put in a cell on her own, show her in acute distress, banging her head and pulling out chunks of hair. No officer appears to have tried to stop her hurting herself in this way.
