Preventing Strip Searches of Children and Youth

A Guide for Advocates

These toolkits are designed to assist individuals and organizations in their advocacy for legislation and regulations to prohibit the strip searches of children and youth except in the most exceptional situations. We often think of strip searches being something that happens only in correctional facilities like juvenile detention centers. But today, children and youth are unnecessarily strip searched in many other settings, including immigration detention centers, schools, residential facilities for “troubled teens,” before visits to incarcerated family members in correctional facilities, and by child protective services workers as part of child welfare investigations. Strip searches cause trauma that can have life-long consequences. For that reason, in 2020 the American Bar Association adopted a resolution that urges governments to enact policies to limit strip searches of children and youth to only those situations where certain enumerated requirements are met. These guides provide background research, talking points, and model language that can be used to enact statutes, regulations, and contract provisions that govern child-serving agencies and facilities so that fewer children and youth will be subjected to this demeaning and dehumanizing practice.

• ABA Resolution Prohibiting Strip Searches of Children and Youth, Except in Exceptional Circumstances
• Preventing Strip Searches—National Toolkit
• Traumatizing and Unnecessary: Ending the Practice of Juvenile Strip Searches—Video Roundtable

State specific tool kits:

• Alabama
• Connecticut
• Illinois
• Maryland
• Minnesota
• New Jersey
• New York
• Pennsylvania
• Texas
• Washington

More state toolkits will be posted in the coming months.

Additional Resources

Impact of Strip Searches:

• Juvenile Law Center Fact Sheet
• Stripped: Unveiling the unseen trauma of strip searching juveniles in the Allegheny County Jail—Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism
• Strip-Searching Children Is State-Imposed Trauma—ABA Human Rights Magazine

News Stories:

• Teen was 'body slammed' at Tennessee group home before her death, attorney says—NBC News
• How dare she dash in for muffins? —The Washington Post
  
• After Report of 4 Girls Strip-Searched at School, Cuomo Calls for Inquiry—The New York Times
• An 8-year-old girl was strip searched at a Virginia prison. She was told it was the only way to see her dad.—The Virginian-Pilot

Model Policies:

• Model Policy: Transgender, Gender Nonconforming, and Intersex Youth in Confinement Facilities—National PREA Resource Center

Information is up to date as of December 2021.

These tools were created by the Children’s Rights Litigation Committee of the American Bar Association Litigation Section. Thank you to everyone who contributed to these toolkits, including the New York Civil Liberties Union, Juvenile Law Center and DLA Piper.