Police strip-searching young women at music festivals is perpetuating the dangerous idea that a woman's body is not hers to decide what to do with.
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Music festivals are important to young people, they're an escape from the grown-up world, a retreat from the rat race they often have no interest in and a chance to connect to each other and to a world of fun and frivolity that makes more sense.
A world where they can express themselves in the way they dress and dance, the people they meet and where they're free of the stress of conformity and judgement.
The only thing to think about is the drop of the beat.
If, in the middle of this happy, safe place a police officer who you've been taught to obey approached you, led you away from your friends into a small room and made you take off all of your clothes, I'm pretty sure you would feel differently about the experience.
An investigation into the strip-search of a 16-year-old girl at Splendour in the Grass music festival in 2017 has revealed how often this practice is occurring.
In the last 12 years the number of strip-searches in New South Wales has increased almost 20 times to around 5000 a year.
NSW Police Minister David Elliott was quoted saying he "would want" his own underage sons to be strip-searched if the police were suspicious of them.
If he had daughters, would he want them to be one of the 122 teenage girls strip-searched since 2016?
One police officer said he personally strip-searched 19 people at the same festival. He had no reason other than a "gut feeling" they possessed drugs. The only drug he found was a single antidepressant tablet.
Statistics from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare suggest it's likely four of those 19 people had previously experienced some form of sexual violence. That's four young people, potentially-retraumatised for no reason and no arrest.
It's 2019 and we have only just started to seriously acknowledge that women and girls have to deal with plenty of unwanted approaches and abuses of power in many professions.
We're just starting to teach young girls body autonomy, affirmative consent and how to be strong enough to say no.
When a young woman takes the chance to put herself out there and to trust her community that she will be safe, that she will make it home that night, that needs to extend to being safe from awful, unlawful and humiliating police practices.
If we are really going to empower women to feel in control of their lives and bodies then we need to properly identify and end the abuses of power that are blocking the change.
