In 2017, the Human Rights Law Centre reviewed six months of recent Victorian strip search register entries obtained through freedom of information laws from the two women’s prisons in Victoria.

Read the report here.

This 2022 state-based review of the Adult Custodial Corrections System in Victoria offers recommendations for improving the safety and culture of the system for people in custody as well as staff. It was conducted by an independent panel appointed by the Victorian Government.

Read the report here.

In a 2024 joint submission to the Australian Law Reform Commission’s inquiry into legal responses to sexual violence, Flat Out, the Human Rights Law Centre and FIGJAM draw on decades of advocacy by lived experience advocates calling out strip searching for what it is: sexual abuse at the hands of the state.

Read the joint submission here.

This 1992 article was featured in the Alternative Law Journal 31, reflecting on the humiliation of women in Victoria’s prisons.

Read the article here.

Daniel Vansetten reflects on strip searching in this 2025 article for About Time, Australia’s National Prison Newspaper.

Daniel spent around 12 years in prison and has since gone on to study a Bachelor of Law at university. He uses his lived experience and study to advocate for prison reform through volunteering with various organisations as well as writing for About Time and producing podcasts with former inmates.

Click here to read.

Outline of evidence by Aunty Vicki Roach to the Yoorook Justice Commission in December 2022.

Read here.

Of all the topics on which I’ve written

There is one that just defies description

And it’s very hard to write about

Coz it’s personal, but the truth will out

In the “free world” there’s no widespread use

Of the strip search, no! That would be abuse

And civil rights be compromised

By indiscriminate “brown-eyes”

But here such rights must be suspended

And modesty must be upended

When someone under no suspicion

And by order of the prison

Be legally enforced to strip

And scrutinized head to toe-tip

In pointless search for contraband

Which if it were there, is in “no-man’s” land

In truth, it’s just humiliation

A power trip fed by our degradation

Like really! What could they hope to find

Secreted in the cracks of our behinds

Do they honestly think that we’re so dumb

That we’d have to smuggle anything up our bum

We’re WOMEN! you jerks in your ivory tower

And the day hasn’t dawned yet that you’ve got the power

To invade the privacy of our womanhood

And gain entry to the vault of the “bank”, and it’s so good

To know that no matter how hard you try

Whatever I smuggle’s safe from your prying eye

Just a few thoughts on the inappropriateness of the strip search procedures for women in prison.

In 2025, the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls welcomed the news that the ACT will expand the use of body scanners to reduce the number of strip searches in prisons and courts.

Read the media release here.