U.S.-HUMAN RIGHTS: Women Prisoners Face Pervasive Sexual Abuse

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Dec 11 1996 (IPS) - Throughout the U.S. prison system, thousands of women face varying degrees of sexual harassment — from inappropriate body searches to forced sex, researchers say.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch charges male prison guards of gross sexual misconduct in six penal facilities.

The ogency studied prisons in the states of California, Georgia, Michigan, Illinois and New York and the District of Columbia and found reports of rape, inappropriate bodily examinations, and verbal harassment in all of them.

“We found that these were not isolated incidents, but that women in different prisons and in different states were suffering the same kinds of abuse, usually but not always at the hands of male officers,” Dorothy Thomas, director of the Women’s Rights Project at Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

“We really didn’t anticipate that we would discover that disturbing a pattern of abuse,” Thomas argued. But in fact, she said, the agency found that no state or federal facility for women studied is free of the threat of sexual abuse.

A major part of the problem, she contended, is that the United States is one of the few countries to have male guards serving in positions of physical contact with women. The roughly 70,000 women prisoners in the United States are often placed in facilities where there are twice to three times as many male guards as female guards.

Many experts on U.S. prisons claim that male guards often exploit such authority to obtain sexual favours of varying types.

“It takes the form of verbal harassment, inappropriate pat- frisks — where corrections officers will touch the private parts of women’s bodies — and more serious charges, like threats to force sexual relations,” said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, which monitors that state’s prisons.

Officers will also try to look at women as they shower, or otherwise create a hostile prison environment for female inmates, he said.

“We often get complaints from women prisoners about (sexual abuse), and where there’s that much smoke, there’s fire,” he adds. Nevertheless, Gangi said, few male officers are ever charged with sexual assaults.

The U.S. Justice Department testified to the United Nations last year that it would seek to improve conditions for women inmates, Thomas noted. “Unfortunately, it’s just that they often do too little, too late,” she said.

Few state or federal facilities have brought charges against male guards, even for the most serious allegations of rape.

In a report released this week, titled ‘All Too Familiar: Sexual Abuse of Women in U.S. State Prisons’, Human Rights Watch cites one Illinois inmate, ‘Zelda’, who said she was raped three times in 1993 and 1994. But the Illinois Department of Corrections declined to investigate because Zelda did not identify her attacker immediately.

This was despite graphic testimony by Zelda, who said, “Even when I stopped fighting he kept hitting me. He raped me vaginally, then he turned me over and raped me anally — then he turned me over again.”

Other women, like ‘Rachel’, a New York inmate, told Human Rights Watch that they allowed guards to fondle or have sex with them because the guards were able to improve their living conditions. “I felt like I owed him,” Rachel said of one guard. “He used to bring me stuff…He did it because he wanted to get into my panties.”

Particularly vulnerable to abuse are lesbians and black women, Thomas said. African American women form 52 percent of the current female prison population, although they comprise only 14 percent of all U.S. women, Human Rights Watch notes.

The agency says that states and the U.S. government must discourage fraternisation between male guards and women inmates through laws forbidding that practise. “Only 27 states expressly prohibit sexual contact between officers and prisoners in their code of law,” Thomas said.

Gangi said that New York moved recently to counter fraternisation by passing a law this year that would make any sex between an officer and an inmate a felony offense. “That gets around the common excuse (in which guards say), ‘The inmate seduced me’,” he said.

But Human Rights Watch argues that most prison codes are still insufficient since they only refer vaguely to “overfamiliarity” or “fraternisation”, rather than explicitly banning sexual relations between the prison population and their guards.

The need for more precise codes will only grow in the futuresince the female prison population is growing rapidly, the rights group contends. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the current female prison population represents an increase of some 400 percent since 1980 — twice as large as the doubling of the general prison population between 1980 and 1995.

There are roughly one million prisoners in all the U.S. federal and state facilities, comprising the largest prison population in the world.