[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
Exactly. I’ve worked in prisons for over twenty five years and I can say that prison rape is nowhere near as prevalent as movies and TV would make it seem. My hunch is that a man in prison is less likely to be forcibly raped than a woman out of the street.
Essentially it’s a matter of safety. Even the biggest prisons in the country are just small villages - everybody knows everybody. Forcible rape is the kind of thing that can provoke anyone to go to extremes to get revenge. Rapists have to depend on anonymity to attack their vicitms and then get away.
So forcible rape just doesn’t work in the circumstances of a prison. If you hold a knife to some new guy’s throat and forcibly sodomize him today, you’re going to be living with him and seeing him all the time for the next ten years. What are the odds you’re going to survive those ten years without him cracking the back of your head open with a weight bar?
[/QUOTE]
I’m not disagreeing with this necessarily, but only clarifying based on my knowledge working in the corrections field.
Part of the confusion over the incidence of rape in the correctional setting is tha people focus, as Little Nemo does, on forcible rape and then say that it doesn’t happen much. But “rape” in this context is defined more broadly than that. The U.S. government’s definition includes, as well as forcible sex, “the carnal knowledge, oral sodomy, sexual assault with an object, or sexual fondling of a person achieved through the exploitation of the fear or threat of physical violence or bodily injury.” (Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.) This type of nonconsensual sex does not require anonymity of the attacker; indeed, it requires instead that the victim be fully aware of the predator’s ability to cause him serious harm if he does not submit.
In fact, as Mr. Dibble said, research indicates that most rape in the correctional setting occurs not as a result of direct physical violence but as a result of credible threats of future violence. It is also worth remembering that in prisons especially, alliances and affiliations can be essential to an inmate maintaining his or her personal safety. If the inmate can only be admitted to an alliance or granted “protection” by sexually submitting, then he will do so. And due to those same alliances, incidences of sexual contact may involve not just two people (sex betwen cell mates at night) but a third person, fully aware of the circumstances, acting as a look-out in other areas (such as the showers). Inmates subject to potential victimization also may well lack the ability to directly retaliate, like by clocking their assaulter with a weight or otherwise attacking him, because that act itself can have serious reprecussions, from administrative punishment for fighting (segregation) to a retaliatory assault by the other person or his friends – one that may well end up with the victim’s death.
It is also worth noting that research confirms what I think most of us would expect: Victims of rape in a prison setting tend to be younger, smaller, more effeminate, gay, socially inadept, first offenders (who have no friends or alliances), or some combination thereof. IOW, those who are most at risk for victimization are in fact the ones most likely to be victimized. Those same types of people will frequently lack the skills or ability to either defend themselves from coercion/attack in the first place or to avenge themselves for it afterward.
It is also worth noting that virtually every authority attempting to research or document this issue concedes that the incidence of prison sexual victimization is vastly underreported. Even given that caveat, the latest U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics indicate that 4% of U.S. prisoners have experienced sexual victimization by other inmates or by staff. That’s some 70,000 inmates every year. It’s a problem, and the government acknowledges that it’s a problem, that’s why Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003. Granted, they’ve done jack-shit with that law since passing it, but passage was itself an acknowledge of a serious issue.
This is a hijack from the OP, I know, but I spend a fair chunk of time explaining to detention officers that just because sex looks consensual doesn’t mean it is consensual, and that if inmates have the courage to report sexual exploitation, those reports must be taken seriously and handled without judgment.
I am not gay but I think that if you talk about your sex life here it’s okay to joke about it a little. Please don’t think ill of me Ip, but I tried to joke with another guy (Otto and he seemed offended. .