Child Q’s school has failed him – teachers must not be an extension of it

L.Most of all, when I heard last week about a teenager in East London who had been strip-searched by police at her school, I was horrified. The horrific account of this state-sanctioned torture of a young girl is horrifying enough, but when I learned that her teachers had called the police – who were standing outside the room while police officers were searching a child’s genitals – I was speechless.

As a teacher, the idea that this could happen somewhere where children should be safe is unimaginable. But the truth is, it’s time for us to be honest about the growing police presence in our schools. This event did not happen in a vacuum. Teachers, once seen as educators and caring, are under pressure to become plainclothes police officers to teach algebra.

In recent years, there has been a growing trend for schools to manage military-style behavior. Routine bag searches, detentions for leaning on class and isolation of students for not bringing lunch money; Police officers patrol the school corridors and the Victorian-style classification that denies students their rights and gives authoritarian control over teachers.

Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. But it is no coincidence that these attitudes toward discipline are disproportionately found in schools that serve a poor community with a high proportion of minority ethnic students, which has been framed as “revolutionaryization” of the inner-city expansions with a bad reputation. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. How many wealthy neighborhood police officers are stabbed inside their school?

When I became a teacher I did not sign up for police personnel-class, black and brown children who are already victims of harassment, systematically disadvantaged and criminalized by the state and a police force that has proven itself to be dominant in discrimination and xenophobia. If we use these harsh methods against children who have already been subjected to deception, what are we doing but preparing them for a life of coercion and control at the hands of the state? We make a self-fulfilling prophecy that says we expect violence and chaos from a certain type of child. We engage in training students to adopt this behavior from the authorities, and we tell parents who are already navigating multiple levels of difficulty that the dehumanization of their child is necessary for educational success and social mobility. The proven link between exclusion and imprisonment reflects the strongly woven relationship between schooling and policing.

British Muslims can testify to the devastation of policing public sector workers such as teachers and GPs. The prevention strategy has caused immense damage to the Muslim community over the years. Worryingly, prevention is part of compulsory protection in schools When teachers misinterpret “begging to the oppressed” as a “weapon of the oppressed”, it “protects” Muslim children by referring them to the anti-terror police. It “protects” Muslim children by allowing anti-terrorism police to interrogate them without the presence of adults. It falls into the impossibly conflicting position of Muslim teachers enforcing state-sanctioned Islamophobia against our own community.

When I first took compulsory prevention training, I was surprised that the so-called symptoms of radicalization sounded like my 15-year-old habit. Starting wearing hijab, taking interest in Arab politics, withdrawing. If I were a teenager now, I would be referred to an anti-radicalization program for expressing nothing but adolescent anger and a youth identity crisis. Muslim students are policed ​​for their normal adolescent behavior and denied the right to explore their evolving ideas about the world without fear of criminalization.

Schools should be a place of open conversation and debate where students are allowed to fight complex and controversial ideas in a safe environment. But black and brown students are not carrying this luxury – they are being policed ​​instead. The Child Q incident is a stark reminder that policing at school does not protect students – it does the opposite. Poor black and brown children are not safe on the streets, and they are not safe in schools unless unnamed teachers are forced to become police officers. We cannot allow our profession to be an extra arm of a broken police service.