Tens of Thousands of Children Have Their DNA Stored by Police, Even if They are Not Charged With Any Crime
By Matt Blake,
Daily Mail (UK)
| 04. 27. 2012
Tens of thousands of children as young as ten are having their DNA swabbed and stored by police forces across the country, even if they are not charged with any offence.
One force admitted taking samples from more than 14,000 youngsters between the ages of ten and 17 over a period of three years.
Devon and Cornwall police say 14,383 children were arrested between 2007 and 2010 and that DNA was taken from the vast majority of them.
And those DNA records can be kept until the suspect reaches the unlikely age of 100 years old.
Not all police forces take DNA samples from suspects of crimes, but under Home Office guidelines they can legally take them from anyone over the age of criminal responsibility, which is currently ten years old.
Prison reform and children rights’ campaigners describe the revelation as ‘bonkers’ and said the DNA details should not be kept. They say while there are no official figures to confirm, the number of youngsters whose DNA has been stored could have run into the hundreds of thousands.
According to...
Related Articles
By Pallab Gosh and Gwyndaf Hughes, BBC News | 06.26.2025
Work has begun on a controversial project to create the building blocks of human life from scratch, in what is believed to be a world first.
The research has been taboo until now because of concerns it could lead to...
Since the “CRISPR babies” scandal in 2018, no additional genetically modified babies are known to have been born. Now several techno-enthusiastic billionaires are setting up privately funded companies to genetically edit human embryos, with the explicit intention of creating genetically modified children.
Heritable genome editing remains prohibited by policies in the overwhelming majority of countries that have any relevant policy, and by a binding European treaty. Support for keeping it legally off limits is widespread, including among scientists...
By Ron Leuty, San Francisco Business Times | 06.16.2025
23andMe's two-step sale to a nonprofit led by former CEO Anne Wojcicki is nothing more than a dance around California's genetic privacy law, state Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a filing late Monday, one day before a judge will...
By Ed Cara, Gizmodo | 06.22.2025
In late May, several scientific organizations, including the International Society for Cell and Gene Therapy (ISCT), banded together to call for a 10-year moratorium on using CRISPR and related technologies to pursue human heritable germline editing. The declaration also outlined...
