Thursday, 2 April 2026

 Georgie PURCELL (Northern Victoria) (19:24): (2488) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Corrections, and the action that I seek is for him to end the use of strip searches in Victorian prisons. As raised by other colleagues on the crossbench throughout the last few sitting weeks, the Human Rights Law Centre, Flat Out and Formerly Incarcerated Girls Justice Advocates Melbourne, or FIGJAM, recently released a report titled Ending Strip Searching in Australian Prisons. The report detailed the dehumanising and ineffective practice of strip searches in prisons across Australia. People in prison experience strip searches as acts of sexual assault and coercive control at the hands of the state. For prisoners who are survivors of family violence and sexual violence, as many in our women’s prisons are, strip searches are a particularly traumatic and triggering experience. The report found that across our prisons, less than 1 per cent of strip searches result in contraband being found, despite people in prisons being subjected to this degrading practice every single day. The report even detailed an experience of a former inmate who, while being transferred between police stations, was in secure custody the whole time and yet was strip searched multiple times in the one night.

Two important points have also been raised by my colleagues on the crossbench, Ms Copsey and Ms Payne, in relation to body scanners and data collection. Body scanners represent a less invasive and less time- and resource-intensive alternative that, despite being invested in, seem to be infrequently used. The Dame Phyllis Frost Centre has put scanning machines in place but they are rarely used by the staff there. This is despite the fact that at the very same centre in April 2022, 221 recorded strip searches were conducted on women with not a single item found. I also agree that at the very least, the government should look to expanding data collection on searches of people in Victorian prisons to resolve what advocates describe as ‘a crisis of secrecy in prisons’. The truth is, despite all the government claims, strip searches are not really a tool to detect contraband. Instead, they are a way to control and demean some of our state’s most vulnerable. As the report states, ‘strip searching is an unnecessary, degrading and deeply harmful practice that must end’, and I urge the government to do so.