As the horror of wide spread strip-searching of children by police emerges, one detail (as always) is left out of the story. The word “boys”. As the scandal continues to unravel, we’re right to talk about the age of these children. So too we are right to talk about the fact that Black children were six times more at risk of being strip searched. But nothing has been said about the fact that boys are NINETEEN times more likely to be targeted. That’s right. It's well hidden: so dig beneath the headlines, search behind the outrage, scroll and scroll and scroll some more, and you’ll find it too. ’95% of strip searched children were boys.’ I looked at dozens of headlines today, and not one of them mentioned this. Some buried the info deep into the article, whilst many said nothing about it at all. I’m tired of this erasure. We saw it in BLM. With police brutality being a racial issue that overwhelmingly impacts men. We saw it a year later in 2021, during London’s deadliest year for teen homicides on record; where every single teen victim killed in London was a boy. Both times race became important parts of the discussion, as it should – but rarely gender. Never ‘boys’, never ‘men’. Why not? Are you telling me, that if 95% of children being stripped-searched were girls, it wouldn’t be plastered over every single newspaper headline? Are we so allergic to truth and so blinded by dogma, that boys must now pay the price of our ignorance, with their lives and dignity? How many more boys will we let down before we grow the hell up and talk about them. Let’s be clear on that. Our media are betraying boys, particularly inner city working class Black boys. They are betrayed by our media's cowardice. Betrayed by our journalist's ignorance. Betrayed by their apathy and their laziness. No wonder people say ‘men’s issues don’t exist’, when the media do such a poor job in talking about them, or simply classify them as “something else”. So when will the media stop erasing our boys? ~ Full report  Images by Klim Musalimov, Kiwi Hug, Muhammed Taha Ibrahim and Julian Myles. #blm #policebrutality #stripsearch #londonmet

2023-03-29