X-ray scanners at airports: how can I avoid dd getting an unnecessary dose of radiation?

[intermittentrain]

Dd is 13 and wants to fly alone to France to join a friend's family. I don't want her to have to go through the X-ray security scanners because I don't think she should have a dose of radiation when it's not medically necessary or in the interests of her health in any way.

We've been looking at airports outside of London which don't have the scanners. Or we could drive her over.

How does this scanning work? As I understand it, not all passengers are scanned, but if they call you for scanning and you refuse, you are grounded, ie you can't fly and you lose your ticket money. If necessary, we could take that risk; but dd would have to have the guts to say, no, I'm not doing it, and we would then drive her over.

What do other people do, please?

If you 'feel obliged to protect your own children', OP, you really should look into the statistics for deaths in road accidents if you're thinking that driving your DD to France will be safer than sending her through an X-Ray machine at an airport.

I'm more worried about being separated from children at airports. At Easter dd went through the detector first and I follwed afterwards. it went off so I had to step aside and wait for a woman to check me over. Dd panicked and tried to run back through the detector to try and get to me.

I understand why security has to be the way it is but think that airport staff need to be aware that someone has to keep a hold of a young child if the parent needs to be searched further. Dh was with ds they had already been scanned and had to go through before us.

Obiously the next time we flew we warned dd that it might happen again and what do do but as I don't fly very often (the last time was 3 years ago)