THE RETURN of Diane Abbott’s popular Conference for the Black Child comes at a crucial time, following controversies over the strip searches of Child Q and Olivia.

The legendary MP said that the new conference, targeted at black parents, was important to stop the criminalisation of black children by police in schools.

The event takes place on Saturday 11 June at a north London school, over a decade after former London mayor Boris Johnson scrapped it.

Speaking to The Voice, the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington said the community needed to discuss solutions to the exclusions-to-prison pipeline.

“There is a continuum between being marginalised or brutalised in a schools context and ending up in the criminal justice system, and I think police want to be in school as part of a criminal justice system push. It’s not really about helping the school community at all.”

The strip search in school of Child Q, a 15-year-old girl who was menstruating at the time, raised issues not only about the unnecessary traumatising of the child but also about the experience of black parents, Abbott said.

“They [teachers] called the police before. And it feels as if because the mother, after the first police intervention, went to school to complain, the second police intervention was quite punitive. 

“It’s almost like saying to the mother ‘this is what we can do to your child.’

“So the Child Q issue is very much about black parents and how they’re treated in the school system.”

The strip-search of Child Q led to large street protests in Hackney, where the incident took place in 2020. The case came to light after a safeguarding review found that racism and adultification of black children was a factor in the child’s treatment.

It then emerged that 25 intimate searches were conducted by police on children in schools in that borough in the same year. 23 children were black and in almost all cases nothing incriminating was found.

Other cases that have provoked widespread concern in the black community include Olivia (not her real name), an autistic black mixed heritage girl who was handcuffed and had her underwear cut off in the presence of male officers before being intimately searched. She was also menstruating at the time, and later tried to kill herself.

In May this year, a 16-year-old girl was roughly detained by a police patrol officer in Stockwell, south London, after the cop wrongly accused her of burglary. She was taken to hospital over bruising of her wrists but police denied knocking her hijab off, saying it was “already partially removed before the incident began.”

When the officer found himself surrounded by the girls’ schoolmates, he called for back-up and 14 police vans and cars arrived at the scene.

Organisers of the Conference for the Black Child, which Abbott is hosting in partnership with campaign group Stand Up To Racism, say there has been huge interest in the event. 

Speakers include educationalist Professor Gus John, Chantelle Lunt from Merseyside Black Lives Matter, social commentator Patrick Vernon OBE, and Kevin Courtney (joint general secretary of the teachers union NEU). The Voice are media partners.

The conference proved highly successful and was notable for queues of black parents around the block outside the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in Westminster.

Abbott said: “So many parents saw what was a crisis for black children in the school system. It gave people courage who might have had a child who was struggling at school.

“It’s very easy to feel isolated, to feel demoralised, to not know where to turn. It was about coming together to share experiences and work on solutions.”

• For free tickets to the Conference for the Black Child click here. The conference will be held on Saturday 11 June, 11am-5pm, at Stoke Newington School, Clissold Road, London, N16 9EX. For more info: Twitter @BlackChildConf or Facebook Events.