For many women prisoners, being held in detention or in custody deprives them of more than just their liberty, but also their physical security and dignity. Male jailers often sexually and physically abuse and mistreat women held in custody, especially those held without access to the courts, to counsel, or to their families.1 These abuses—forced vaginal, anal and oral sex; inappropriate sexual touching and fondling; beatings; excessive pat-downs and strip searches; and the use of vulgar, sexualized language by guards toward women prisoners—are facilitated by the power of male guards in the daily lives of women prisoners and by official tolerance of abusive guard behavior. In addition, prison guards and staff hold over women prisoners the threat of further abuse or retaliation should the women report misconduct or seek redress. As a consequence, incarcerated women are intimidated into silence, and their attackers are rarely called to account for their crimes against women in custody.
Human Rights Watch has documented and published reports on violence against women in custody in the United States, Pakistan, and Egypt. Even societies as apparently disparate as these three, have in common that women in custody are subjected to official mistreatment that ranges from humiliation to torture, although the specific countries' situations determine variations in mistreatment and in the remedies that are available. In Pakistan and the United States, as the population of women in custody has increased, so have the possibilities for abuse because prison authorities do not adequately train and oversee their staff. We found that women in custody are frequently subjected to a range of abuses by their jailers from the time of their arrests throughout their incarceration.
Women are incarcerated for numerous reasons, some of which violate international human rights law. Many are arrested and detained or imprisoned as a result of either discriminatory laws or the discriminatory application of laws. For example, in Pakistan, penal laws that criminalize fornication outside of marriage are discriminatory in application. One section of Pakistan's Islamic penal laws, known as the Hudood Ordinances, defines the offense ofzina in part as "sexual intercourse without being validly married," and is routinely applied to imprison the victims of rape.2 A woman who reports rape to the authorities risks being accused of zina and incarcerated, having "confessed" to unlawful intercourse, should her accusation not be believed or proved under criminal laws. Many Pakistani women find rape extremely difficult to prove under criminal laws that simultaneously set a high standard of proof for rape and undervalue women's testimony as witnesses or victims.
State agents also detain women in place of or to punish their absent male family members or in an effort to coerce male relatives hiding from authorities to turn themselves in. In Egypt, internal security forces have detained female family members of suspected Islamist militants who are wanted by the authorities, in order to force the militants to turn themselves in. These arbitrary detentions, themselves violative of international human rights standards, are frequently accompanied by threats of sexual and physical abuse, as well as sexualized verbal degradation. These abuses are used to compel the men in hiding to give themselves up in exchange for the release of their female family members. The act or threat of rape and other sexual mistreatment of women are perceived in Egypt to be profound offenses against a woman's individual honor as well as the honor of her family and male relatives. Consequently, when security forces threaten to rape or otherwise sexually assault a detained woman, they understand that they are committing a grave offense against not only the woman herself, but also against an entire family or community.
Once imprisoned, both male and female prisoners suffer violence at the hands of abusive guards. However, male jailers often abuse women prisoners for different reasons than those for which male prisoners are harmed. Often, because male guards bring to their jobs discriminatory attitudes about male dominance and female submissiveness, women prisoners are treated in ways that punish them for not meeting their male guards' expectations about female comportment. For example, some state-level prisons in the United States discipline women prisoners more severely for more petty infractions than their male counterparts. In other cases, the mistreatment of women in detention appears to target their sexuality in a deliberate attempt to degrade them and, by extension, their male family members. Egyptian security forces, for instance, have compelled female relatives of suspected Islamist militants to strip naked, and then placed them in a closed room with naked male detainees in an effort to degrade them.
Women held overnight in pretrial detention at police lockups, often with no access to legal representation and without being officially charged, are in many ways the most vulnerable to physical and sexual assault. These women are invisible in the criminal justice system. Many times, no official, apart from the arresting officers, knows that the women are being held.
Women who are mistreated, threatened and harassed while in custody often find that reporting such abuse achieves negligible results and may lead to retaliation. Reflecting an institutional bias against prisoner testimonies, prison officials are disinclined to believe a woman prisoner's allegations of abuse by a guard simply because of her prisoner status. In numerous cases we have investigated, prison officials favor the word of a guard over that of the prisoner even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. This failure to credit women's allegations and to provide an impartial grievance mechanism denies prisoners their right to due process, reinforces the prisoner's sense of powerlessness, condones the guard's behavior, and results in impunity for abusive prison staff. The virtual absence of accountability hinders attempts at redress for custodial abuse.
When confronted with documentation of widespread violence against women in custody in their countries, governments have often denied or ignored the role of state agents, or, as in the case of Pakistan, accused the women prisoners of lying about their ordeals. In Egypt, the government has denied the detention of innocent citizens and ignored allegations of sexual assault and mistreatment, or it has characterized the allegations as attempts by Islamist militants to slander the government. The United States federal government claims to have instituted protections for female prisoners, in particular to safeguard their privacy; in practice, however, these procedures appear to have offered women little protection from sexual misconduct and other inhuman and degrading treatment by guards who work in state-level prisons.
Actual or threatened reprisal by prison staff also contributes to the sense of powerlessness among women in custody. In the United States, guards have retaliated against women who complained of harassment or abuse by citing them for such violations as "refusal to follow an order," or by threatening to postpone their parole. In Pakistan, implicated policemen have visited former female detainees at their homes to intimidate them into withdrawing allegations of custodial abuse. The threat of retaliation often succeeds in stopping women prisoners from making complaints.
Even in cases where prison officials investigate allegations of assault by guards against women prisoners, the investigations seldom result in dissuasive punishment of the offending officer. For example, in the countriesexamined below, too often police and guards who assault women prisoners get the equivalent of a slap on the wrist in the form of a suspension or written reprimand. Prison guards found guilty of assault after internal investigations are rarely fired or criminally prosecuted. Rather, they may be allowed to resign or transfer to another prison facility; neither form of punishment limits the officers' ability to work in a supervisory position over other female prisoners.
1 While there have been some instances of female jailers abusing female prisoners or detainees, Human Rights Watch investigations found that in the overwhelming percentage of cases of custodial violence, the alleged abuser is male.
2 Offense of Zina (Enforcement of Hudood) Ordinance, 1979, Section 4.
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