Women groups from all over the country want the police to stop the `nude ear-squat' procedure by police on women detainees as it is an outrage of their modesty. We should all support this. And we should also stop such punitive action on male detainees too because we are talking about men who are not found guilty by any court yet.

The police lock-up conditions should be improved and the detainees should not be required to strip to their underwear, allegedly to stop them from committing suicide. For the police, these procedures have become a sadistic punishment which they can impose on the detainees.

But who are they to punish the detainees before a judge says so? If there is no adequate safeguard against such procedures, I suggest that any stripping be done with a doctor's supervision.

Think about it, even if detainees were to keep some drugs inside their private part, are we talking about such a big amount that we need to allow the dignity of all the other detainees to be sacrificed for it ? And since many detainees are probably detained in circumstances where they have little chance to insert anything into their private parts, the suspicion seems unreasonable.

The chances of getting anything from such a procedure as the ear squat cannot be too high or else police would have backed it up with reliable statistics before the recent commission investigating the nude ear-squat scandal.

But so far, the police can only give anecdotal evidence about what has been found from such a procedure - there are no statistics in all the years that they have practiced it. So it is safe to say that should they have strong suspicions and justice demands that the rights of a detainee be protected, the procedure must be carried out with the supervision of a doctor.

My personal experience of being stripped in a police lock-up - though there were no charges later - tells me that any punitive procedure where no one can be your witness is bound to be abused, so stop it for women and men alike.

There is no excuse for the police to play the prosecutor, judge and executioner at the same time in a democracy. To allow it to continue is incontrovertible proof that what we have is a police state.