The School Crotch Inspector
Opinion Editorial by Jacob Sullum -
Apr 3, 2008
25 ratings from readers
Should children be subject to strip-searches at school? One school in Arizona school thinks so, and was backed up by a court of appeals, but this sort of "zero tolerance" makes zero sense.
There are two
kinds of people in the world: the kind who think it’s perfectly reasonable to
strip search a 13-year-old girl suspected of bringing ibuprofen to school, and
the kind who think those people should be kept as far away from children as
possible.
The first group includes officials at Safford Middle School in
Safford, Ariz., who in 2003 forced eighth-grader Savana Redding to prove she
was not concealing Advil in her crotch or cleavage.
It also includes
two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, who last fall
ruled that the strip search did not violate Savana’s Fourth Amendment rights.
The full court, which recently heard oral arguments in the case, now has an
opportunity to overturn that decision and vote against a legal environment in
which schoolchildren are conditioned to believe government agents have the
authority to subject people to invasive, humiliating searches on the slightest
pretext.
Safford Middle
School has a “zero tolerance” policy that prohibits possession of all drugs,
including not just alcohol and illegal intoxicants but prescription medications
and over-the-counter remedies, “except those for which permission to use in
school has been granted.”
In October 2003, acting on a tip, Vice Principal
Kerry Wilson found a few 400-milligram ibuprofen pills (each equivalent to two
over-the-counter tablets) and one nonprescription naproxen tablet in the
pockets of a student named Marissa, who claimed Savana was her source.
Savana, an
honors student with no history of disciplinary trouble or drug problems, said
she didn’t know anything about the pills and agreed to a search of her
backpack, which turned up nothing incriminating. Wilson nevertheless instructed
a female secretary to strip search Savana under the school nurse’s supervision,
without even bothering to contact the girl’s mother.
The secretary
had Savana take off all her clothing except her underwear. Then she told her to
“pull her bra out and to the side and shake it, exposing her breasts,” and “pull
her underwear out at the crotch and shake it, exposing her pelvic area.”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between drug warriors and child
molesters.
“I was
embarrassed and scared,” Savana said in an affidavit, “but felt I would be in
more trouble if I did not do what they asked. I held my head down so they could
not see I was about to cry.”
She called it “the most humiliating experience I have
ever had.” Later, she recalled, the principal, Robert Beeman, said, “he did not
think the strip search was a big deal because they did not find anything.”
The U.S. Supreme
Court has held that a public school official’s search of a student is
constitutional if it is “justified at its inception” and “reasonably related in
scope to the circumstances which justified the interference in the first place.”
This search was neither.
When Wilson
ordered the search, the only evidence that Savana had violated school policy
was the uncorroborated accusation from Marissa, who was in trouble herself and
eager to shift the blame. Even Marissa (who had pills in her pockets, not her
underwear) did not claim that Savana currently possessed any pills, let alone
that she had hidden them under her clothes.
Savana, who was
closely supervised after Wilson approached her, did not have an opportunity to
stash contraband.
As the American Civil Liberties Union puts it, “There was no
reason to suspect that a 13-year-old honor-roll student with a clean
disciplinary record had adopted drug-smuggling practices associated with
international narcotrafficking, or to suppose that other middle-school students
would willingly consume ibuprofen that was stored in another student’s crotch.”
The invasiveness
of the search also has to be weighed against the evil it was aimed at
preventing. “Remember,” the school district’s lawyer recently told ABC News by
way of justification, “this was prescription-strength ibuprofen.”
It’s a good
thing the school took swift action, before anyone got unauthorized relief from
menstrual cramps.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. His is also the author of For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health. Sullum is a
graduate of Cornell University, where he majored in economics and
psychology. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter.
