A Metropolitan police custody sergeant faces possible dismissal for ordering the strip search of an academic who tried to give legal advice to a 15-year-old boy.

Konstancja Duff, a political philosopher, was allegedly wrestled to the ground by officers and arrested when she tried to help the boy after he was caught in a stop and search sweep in May 2013.

She was taken to a north London police station, where she says that officers pinned her on a cell floor and cut off her clothes with scissors while taunting her after she refused to give her name. The sergeant in charge later claimed he had feared she might have been carrying a weapon.

During the incident, Duff says she suffered injuries to her arms, wrists and hands that hampered her pursuit of a master of performance degree at the Royal College of Music, and continue to cause her pain. She says she was carried through the custody suite with her breasts exposed by a paper suit that would not fasten properly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Konstancja Duff shows her injuries sustained while in police custody.

Since then, Duff has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“All the things I had to do in my life were put on hold,” she said, although she maintains that others have it worse. “I don’t think that what happened to me was unusual and I’m special. I think police routinely use these kinds of tactics, and I’m in the lucky position to do something about it.”

Now, almost five years after magistrates rejected police claims that Duff assaulted and obstructed officers, Sgt Kurtis Howard is to answer an allegation that the order to remove her clothes was based on insufficient grounds.

The hearing comes only after Duff sought a judicial review against a decision by the police watchdog, then known as the Independent Police Complaints Commission, that absolved officers of any wrongdoing over their actions.

Duff had been tutoring an A-level student in the gardens of the Wilton estate in Hackney, east London, one early evening in spring 2013 when police entered in force.

Concerned by the commotion, she decided to go and have a look at what was happening. She found officers surrounding a teenage boy who was calling for help.

“He was saying he wanted his mum present for the search,” Duff said. “I knew a little bit about legal observing and rights around stop and search, so I went over.”

Duff says she first tried to mediate with officers, but they ignored her. She then spoke to the boy, who later turned out to be 15, and offered him a card detailing his rights during a stop and search and including the numbers of independent solicitors.

But when she reached out to give it to him “the officers were immediately aggressive”, said Duff, describing how they ordered her back, then detained her. “They were like, ‘That’s it, you’re nicked.’ They grabbed me, started dragging me around and hurled me to the ground, and then say: ‘You’ve assaulted us.’”

Officers, who found a knife on the boy, then bundled Duff into the back of a police van and drove her to Stoke Newington police station, where Howard allegedly refused her requests to see a doctor and a solicitor, and ordered that she be strip searched.

Duff previously told BBC News that she was pinned to the floor in a cell by three female officers, cuffed at her wrists and bound at her feet, and her clothes cut off with scissors as male officers stood by the open door.

“Once they had me completely naked they put me into a paper suit which didn’t do up properly so my breasts were exposed, and they paraded me like that through the station and then dumped me on the floor of another cell,” she said.

Despite Duff being cleared in court of the charges for which she was arrested, the IPCC did not uphold her complaint of wrongful arrest, although it did recommend that several of the officers be given advice.

Howard will face his disciplinary hearing on 29 August, over claims he breached the Met’s standards of professional behaviour in respect of authority, respect and courtesy; orders and instructions; and discreditable conduct.