This posting is written by a professor who perhaps understandably has asked not to reveal his or her name……rumor has it that the TSA regularly reads the AJA blog.

I wanted to share with you a post I sent somewhere else.

 

As a lawyer I have been lobbying (through legal publications) in my country for a better and stricter legal framework for body searches by the police, other forces and prison officers, in the latter case with some success.

When I started publishing on this subject in 2001, it was frowned upon. Yet not a single criminal lawyer had ever questioned the legal rules applying to strip searches and other forms of searches, despite the fact that they allowed total discretionary power over people. A total scandal.

I was already sensitive to the extreme violation of a person’s intimacy and dignity inherent to body searches and this had started when I was doing my PhD and heard inmates saying they preferred not to have visitors or skipped visitations because they could not bear the systematic strip search that followed anymore.

 

Since I have started needing a wheel chair in airports – I have a degenerative joint illness and cannot stand in a queue or go up/down stairs anymore – I too have started being a victim of body searches. Every single time I go to an airport, I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME I am singled out and frisk searched (sometimes real real long and insistant). Last time I was in Romania, I got a ‘follow us Mam’, got locked in a room with two custom officers who searched me with a vengeance and when I was ‘released’ I had tears in my eyes and it took me a long hour, phone calls to my loved ones and friends aplenty to fight them off and calm down. Assume that I don’t look the part – according to these people’s expectation of what a ‘crippled person’ should look like. I supposed I should look older and drool and add a little bit of the old Tourette syndrome or something.

I feel humiliated every single time. Being in a wheel chair AND being singled out … well ladies and gents I understand why being black or coloured and being systematically stopped by the police hurts and puts you in anger mode when it is repeated again and again. I shan’t turn into a criminal. Lucky I am an academic and can try and intellectualise. It does not stop hurting and being humiliating though and to feel extremely angry.