Being raped is not part of the sentence
This shocking statement heads the campaign of the human rights group Just Detention to raise awareness of sexual abuse in prison and put a stop to it through legislation and inspections. In the UK the Justice Minister Christopher Grayling has blocked the attempts of the Howard League to speak to prisoners, including those released on licence, about the abuses they may have suffered. In Latin America very little information is available; in Iran female political prisoners have been systematically sexually abused to elicit confessions.
This article was written probably in 2015 and may have been published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper, but since the paper was hacked it has not proved possible to retrieve all the files. I am therefore posting the full article here until the website can be restored to full functioning.
Graham Douglas.
Prison has several objectives: punishment, crime prevention, public safety in some cases, and reform of offenders. The punishment component is loss of liberty, although loss of career, friends, family break-ups, and mental health issues are also consequences, which are not taken into account in sentencing.
But on top of this there is sexual abuse of prisoners by other inmates and prison staff, and the collateral damage of this may include infections with sexually transmitted diseases including HIV, physical injury and immense psychological damage, leading in some cases to suicide, as well as making rehabilitation even more difficult. Yet this is a topic which receives only occasional press coverage compared to other human rights issues. It is a facet of other institutions too, as the Catholic Church has been forced to admit in recent years, and in the last few days a report has emerged of rape in US military academies at levels far higher than in comparable universities.
Compared to the US, the UK government is still obsessed with controlling information rather than opening up this abuse of human rights in British prisons. When a person is incarcerated, their loss of freedom is supposed to have a counterpart in which the prison takes on responsibility for their safety. It is well-known that victims are often reluctant to talk because of the shame they feel, for fear of retribution and lack of trust that the authorities will actually help them. To understand the scale of the problem it is essential to provide prisoners with an opportunity to talk in a safe and confidential environment, yet the present UK Minister of Justice, Christopher Grayling has refused a request by the respected Howard League for Penal Reform to interview serving prisoners or even those released on licence. This flies in the face of the fact that sexual abuse in prisons is internationally recognised as torture.
Abuse: who, how, and how many?
The NGO Just Detention International (JDI) has a very informative website in both English and Spanish, which describes some of the key features of sexual abuse, including the trading of influence, protection or privileges, food or drugs in exchange for sexual relations, whether by staff or other prisoners. Minorities and anyone who is considered weak or feminine are often targeted in male prisons. LGBT inmates and those with mental health problems are 8 to 10 times more likely to be raped by other prisoner, according to a US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report in 2013. Incidents of forced prostitution of LGBT prisoners by guards for other inmates have also been reported in US prisons.
In some countries rape is employed as a means to force political prisoners to confess to crimes they may or may not have committed.
A thoroughly researched US Department of Justice report in 2008 estimated that 209,400 prisoners in US prisons, jails and lock-ups had suffered sexual abuse that year; close to 10% of the prison population.
The JDI Communications Director, Jesse Lerner-Kinglake told me that one of the worst aspects of rape by other prisoners is that the victim is then considered a ‘girl’ or ‘bitch’ and is seen as fair game by other prisoners. Likewise those who have been abused before imprisonment are at greater risk of being attacked in prison. In the Oglala Sioux Tribal Offenders Facility 10% of prisoners reported sexual victimisation by staff, whereas in most prisons the incidence if staff abuse is roughly similar to that by other prisoners. Contrary to popular belief women are proportionately more at risk than men, although the number of male prisoners is much greater. As Lerner-Kinglake points out, rape is an expression of sexism and homophobia just as it is outside prison. However the absence of conjugal visits has been claimed as a causative factor in male rape of men in Caribbean prisons.
JDI has published many survivors’ testimonies on its website, which illustrate the enormous challenges faced by prisoners who have been victimised sexually, and this is in a country where the law is being amended and campaigning groups are organised and active.
The graphic accounts detail every imaginable abuse of the rules and exploitation of prisoners’ vulnerability by prison staff, as well as collusion with abuse by other prisoners. Here is one of many testimonies. Commonly prisoners were ‘punished’ for their abuse by staff, who may have been dismissed but were rarely indicted. The trauma inflicted continues to disturb victims long after they are released.
Unfortunately, the UK has a Justice Minister who seems unfit for purpose in human rights terms; his innovative ban on prisoners receiving books has finally been rescinded after determined campaigning, as well as mockery in the press.
Legislation
Strong monitoring systems, based on talking to prisoners in safe environments are essential to stopping these abuses. 71 countries including the UK - which has been one of its strongest supporters internationally - but not the US, have signed up to the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT), which supplements the CAT by requiring countries to establish independent national agencies to inspect prisons. Despite this the US has progressed much further than the UK, spurred on by JDI’s powerful campaigner Tim Cahill, who was himself infected with HIV after being gang-raped in prison. The Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) was passed in 2003 and ratified in 2012. The biggest step forward resulting from PREA has been the obligation on the US BJS to provide statistics and monitoring of prisons, and as a result it was shown in 2006 that nearly half of staff guilty of sexual misconduct faced no legal action, and 15% were allowed to keep their jobs. By 2014 Six States had still not confirmed compliance either completed or in progress, despite a Presidential Memorandum in 2012 stating that all Federal confinement facilities must comply. The JDI is campaigning for an increase in penalties for non compliant States, as well as for the US to sign up to OPCAT. One of the biggest obstacles that still remains in the PREA is its prohibition of private right of legal action by prisoners themselves. The report of the UN CAT Committee in 2014 spelled out that rape is an example of torture, and as such must be criminalized and prohibited. Other JDI concerns include the use of solitary confinement as a means of protection for rape victims, and the need to ensure PREA compliance in US immigration detention centres.
PART 2: institutional violence against women around the globe
There are important variations between countries, both in the abuses perpetrated and the existence of organisations campaigning against it. The US has enshrined protection in law through the Prison Rape Elimination Act, but implementation has been slow in some states. In the UK a culture of secrecy under the Justice Minister is blocking information gathering. In Latin America very little information is available except when shocking cases hit the headlines, while in the Islamic Republic of Iran appalling abuse of female political prisoners has been uncovered.
One issue is common to all sexual abuse: domination of the powerless by those who make the rules to suit themselves, and the secrecy of institutions only encourages this.
The UK
The Howard League has published a report emphasizing the need for investigation to establish accurate figures, while raising similar points to JDI regarding the vulnerability of LGBT prisoners, grooming of prisoners by staff and inmates and warning of the effects of staff reductions and overcrowding, and the fact that the police are not routinely notified about allegations of sexual abuse. In an email Lorraine Atkinson of the Howard League acknowledged the progress made by the PREA in the US, and the changing attitudes among prison staff as a result. She pointed out that there is ambiguity in the regulations about consensual sex in UK prisons, that prisoners are being told that they have the right to ask for condoms for health reasons, yet also told that if they are caught having sex they will be punished. The Howard League has no plans to investigate these abuses in Detention Centres, despite the reports about Yarls Wood. The figure reported by the Howard League range from 1-5% of prisoners being abused sexually, compared to the rates of 2-4% in the US, but it is not clear what kind of figures were collected. In the US a snapshot investigation was held on one day, but it was immediately recognised that this could not represent the true annual figures due to prisoner turnover, hence the true US figure closer to 10%. The complacency of British politicians is highlighted by campaigner Alex Cavendish
Latin America
The lack of data in this region is shocking, and the only reports I have found were a case reported in the press in Brazil in 2007, which reached headlines because it involved the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl held with 20 men in a prison in Pará State and relentlessly raped for a month. The state governor acknowledged that only 6 of the 132 jails in the state have separate facilities for men and women, and that the girl was never formally charged with the robbery she was suspected of. Amnesty commented that abuse of all prisoners in Brazilian prisons is endemic and women suffer more through being victimised for sex by male prisoners and staff. Brazil is a signatory to OPCAT The country’s prisons held 420,000 prisoners although designed for 262,000. Female prisoners were reported as being handcuffed while giving birth. This case emerged at the same time as a reduction in the age of criminal responsibility was being discussed. A 2008 report revealed that Brazilian macho culture leads to male prisoners being permitted conjugal visits much more frequently than female prisoners.
A report from a Brazilian women’s prison in 2000, revealed high levels of STD infection, with HIV at 9.9% and Syphilis at 16%, while Tuberculosis is common due to overcrowding and poor sanitation. Following a 2013 protest at a state prison in Maranhão, against sexual and other abuses of prisoners, Dilma Roussef created a National Mechanism to Prevent and Combat Torture, by regular prison inspections, but Human Rights Watch reported in 2014 that it had not begun its work. The biggest problems identified by HRW include impunity, inadequate or delayed forensic examinations and lack of judicial oversight.
A book on the conditions of women in prison in Argentina, Mujeres en Prisión by the NGO can be downloaded from the CELS website. The chapter on sexual violence points to the use of invasive body-searching of women, by male staff belonging to an intervention squad during disturbances; and sometimes as a punishment. Rapes by staff also occur when prisoners are alone in punishment cells. These abuses have been categorised as violence against women by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
Protection against abuse suffered a step backward in Venezuela in 2013 when the country withdrew from the Inter-American system for Human Rights.
Rape as an abuse of political prisoners
One of the most shocking reports in recent years was published in 2014 by the Iranian Human Rights Review. In 2013 the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Professor Rashida Manjoo delivered a report on the systematic raping of virgin women arrested for political activism, prior to their execution in Iran during the first two decades of the Islamic State after the 1979 revolution.
According to the report, Ayatollah Montazeri who was deputy leader convinced Ayatollah Kholmeini that executing young women was against certain interpretations of Islamic law. However ‘the judicial and security officials interpreted - - interpreted the order as a dictate to kill as long as the girls were to lose their virginity prior to their execution’. This was not the only reason for the systematic rape, but it illustrates the horror of a perverted ideology combined with institutionalised secrecy, and powerless victims.
As the report goes on to point out, this abuse was so systematic and so long-lasting that it must have been known to higher government officials, and probably constitutes a crime against humanity in the interpretation of the International Criminal Court.
In other cases forced marriages were used as an inducement to escape execution. The catalogue of torture described in the report includes cases in one prison where women were kicked in the genitals while being forced to crawl on the floor, causing heavy bleeding. In other cases women were tortured or raped in front of their children.
An important aspect of this abuse was the way the cultural taboo on sex outside marriage was exploited to induce confessions of political activism, as being preferential to exposure for ‘immorality’. Many women reported that the physical pain of being tortured or flogged was less than the feeling of loss of their identity as a human being due to being insulted and humiliated.
Human Rights Watch called on Iran to investigate sexual assaults in prison back in 2009:
http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/06/09/iran-stop-covering-sexual-assaults-prison
The social context of rape
Sexual abuse occurs outside prison as well but one common factor secrecy. The abuser who is a family member or partner takes advantage of the privacy of the home to enforce their torture, exploiting fear and shame experienced by their victim. In closed institutions, whether a prison, a religious boarding school, a military barracks or a home for orphan children this is amplified by the power of the institution and its hierarchy. And another is the powerlessness, socially speaking of the victim- young, emotionally or mentally disturbed, racial minority, LGBT are all categories targeted by abusers, who make and subvert the normal rules of society. This second point is clear in the case of rape in male prisons: the perpetrator rapes another man while at the same time humiliating the victim for ‘being gay’. It is the victim who is punished as in the case of women who are raped in countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The ideology of the country itself is supporting and normalising a human rights abuse against those whom it defines as of lower social status. This control of women, especially, may come from a traditional conservative society, as in the documentary film Salma, about a woman in southern India, or it may be ‘justified’ in terms of a religious creed, especially Islam.