She was thirteen. An honor student. She may or may not have given her friend Ibuprofen. She certainly didn't have any on her. School officials, acting upon the word of a scared child, had absolutely no right to look. What the hell were these school officials thinking?
The
LA Times reported today that a circuit court overturned (in a 6-5 decision) previous rulings about an assistant principal violating a student's constitutional rights. He is now considered liable for damages. A young woman in eighth grade -
I'm sorry: I'm so angry, I can hardly write. It's not just her rights that were violated. Her body was violated - a visual violation by people looking for a chemical.
She was brought into the assistant principal's office and forced to strip off her clothes, including her underwear, exposing first her breasts and then her pubic area, on the erroneous suspicion that she was hiding Ibuprofen. At this Arizona middle school, students are prohibited from carrying drugs - even over-the-counter medication - into school.
She was searched by women, a nurse and a secretary. It's still abuse. I've been through these searches. Whether male or female, regardless of the sex of the person searching you, it's a violation.
I spent six months in prison for civil disobedience a few years back. Far and away the worst part of prison was the strip search. Whenever I had a visit, on my way back to the living range, I ran the random (and sometimes not so random) risk of having to strip off all my clothes, including undergarments - usually alternating, just in the way this girl was forced to strip - bend over and cough. Depending on the guard, and depending on the day, maybe one in three prisoners would be searched. As a survivor of sexual abuse, these post-visit strip searches were particularly traumatic. Given the percentage of incarcerated women who are also survivors (somewhere around 75%), these strip searches were traumatic for most women. The guards knew this, and some used their power punitively. Even for women on the outside, sexual abuse and sexual assault are far too common. And now middle school administrators think they can strip search students when looking for drugs?
It scares the hell out of me that because of the drug war, middle school administrators are behaving like prison guards. It horrifies me that an assistant principal, his administrative assistant, a nurse, five judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and two previous sets of judges all thought this was acceptable. Is nothing and no one - not even 13-year-old young women and their bodies - safe from the drug war zealots?
And what are we doing to our students by treating them in such a manner? Why are we doing things to 13-year-old girls that appear to be preparing them for prison?
While the principal might be exposed to a civil liability, it's not nearly enough. Everyone who stood by should be fired for failure to protect the student. Everyone who participated in this horrific violation - the nurse, the secretary, the principal - deserves nothing short of being expelled from our public schools immediately. They should be nowhere near our children, ever, let alone responsible for their protection.
Posted by Vera Leone