A large part of our women’s population is made up of incarcerated women. Currently, there are over 200,000 women who are incarcerated in the United States, and at least 15% of these women have experienced sexual victimization, while serving their jail/prison sentence. When people mention sexual victimization of incarcerated men or women, the average person is not even aware of this being a problem, and or do not care enough about this problem. Typically you can find a shared mentality that “these people” made bad choices to defy some law(s), therefore the deviant act results in them being stripped of their rights, sent to prison, more importantly that “these people” deserve what happens to them during our set process for retribution. This is the first error when it comes to really addressing violence within any institution. Categorizing every person who goes to prison/jail into one generalized stigma, results in overlooking crucial details, that are actually landmarks. Simply because someone is in jail or prison doesn’t mean they lose their human rights. In no instance, should anything non consensual such as rape/assault, harassment, or bodily harm, be overlooked or not taken seriously; incarcerated or not.
It may not come as a surprise, but men are responsible for nearly all the staff-on-inmate sexual assaults of women. Part of this is because men make up for most of prison/jail staff, guards, wardens, etc. Many institutions are designed to give these people in charge complete control over inmates and the ability to abuse this power is way too easy. Which explains why so many men are able to commit these assaults on these women. Many of these women were assaulted with brute force, threatened, or coerced into doing things, and given the situation, there are not many options to not let this happen. Technically, women only account for a relatively small population of incarcerated people, but women account for nearly half of the sexual assault victims and cases in the U.S.
For a second, imagine the joy one may feel seeing their mother or sister or any female close to you, coming home after serving a long sentence. You’re expecting your loved one to be happy now that they are home. Only to find out that your mother or sister had been sexually abused and taken advantage of during the entirety of their prison time. That in order to get proper food, or hygienic necessities, use the shower, be allotted visitation, get phone calls, go outside, not get beaten or harassed. In order to avoid any of those things your loved one had to allow guards to sexually assault her? Time after time, in order to be allowed rights, human rights even prisoners are supposed to get, she had to endure some form of sexual assault. Now hearing something like this would make most people sick to their stomachs or maybe angry, but who’s stopping this?
Staff-inmate sexual victimization is a huge institutional problem, but even if you’re fortunate enough to not go through this, there are still sexual violence situations that prisoners may face. Inmate on inmate sexual victimization is at least three times higher for women than males. Part of this is due to the stereotypes and stigma behind female-on-female sexual assault. People think it doesn’t or cannot happen, causing it to again be overlooked and not taken seriously. This also attributes to the under-reporting of these incidents, especially because it takes a lot to even prove an incident happened. Which in turn, is taken advantage of and only fuels the problem more. It is hard to catch these things when they are happening due to many problems, poor design of these prison/jail facilities, poor funding which affects employment and hiring, and of course every institution simply has bad apples. Also, many people are ashamed to speak out on these situations, given rules and codes jail inmates follow that keep you from “snitching”. Rarely seen, hardly proven, not many things are done to prevent and keep these assaults from taking place.
There are many solutions being talked about to combat sexual violence in prisons. For example, recently congress created a federal act called, Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) which is supposed to protect the rights of these women and men, but generally the act is limited in what it actually does. It may be insufficient as of now due to the fact that it’s only federally mandated. Meaning, it is basically a suggestion to the states to follow, but is a choice to truly mandate and carry out the proper necessities by each state’s representatives etc. Sexual violence of women in prison/jails simply isn’t looked at as dire enough that we are forcing each state to hold their government funded institutions to such standards. I would also propose victim avocation system to be put in place in each prison according to a developed women to men ratio. This system would ensure/monitor all sexual violence and all forms of violence and neglect that occurs within prison systems around the U.S. This will not only prevent these scary scenarios I talked about earlier but also help create a more positive narrative, in hopes the “rape culture” in prisons will not be so normalized and we can create a better one.
References:
https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2014/09/christina-piecora-female-inmates/
This is more prevalent than most people realize. I cannot even imagine the fear that these women must feel. Like you stated, in order to receive phones calls, showers, etc. they must be sexually assaulted and who will believe a prisoner over a warden or correctional officers. It is sad what happens within the prison system.