Blog

Calling out violence against women in prisons as a systemic problem

7 days ago
0 Views
10 Min Read

When women in prison report sexual violence, the responses of the criminal legal system, the media and wider society are often deeply troubling – even when a prison employee is convicted in the courts, according to public interest advocates Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy OAM.

Criminalised women require “extraordinary courage” to report such assaults, “knowing exactly how their pasts will be weaponised against them”, Lean and Kilroy write below, in an examination of issues raised by the recent conviction in South Australia of a prison worker for raping and sexually assaulting a woman imprisoned at Adelaide Women’s Prison.

“The real question is not why women in prison are reluctant to report sexual violence,” they say. “It is why we continue to build institutions where reporting demands extraordinary courage while abusing power requires only opportunity.”

Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy write:

Women imprisoned by the state retain the right to bodily autonomy. Yet when they report sexual violence by employees of the prison system, it is often the women, not the institution, who are forced to prove their credibility.

When a South Australian jury found prison maintenance officer Enio Screpanti guilty of raping and sexually assaulting a woman imprisoned at the Adelaide Women’s Prison, many saw it as evidence that the criminal legal system had worked. A woman had reported sexual violence. The allegations had been tested before a jury. A guilty verdict had been returned.

But the verdict told only part of the story.

The trial also revealed something deeply troubling about how our criminal legal system, our media and our society respond when women in prison report sexual violence.

While the accused sat in the dock, it was often the women who found themselves defending their character, explaining their past and proving they were worthy of belief.

That should concern every one of us because prison does not strip a woman of her right to bodily autonomy. It does not extinguish her right to live free from sexual violence. Nor should it erase her capacity to be believed.

Yet that is precisely what too many women experience when they speak out.

Throughout the Screpanti trial, the criminal histories of women who gave evidence became a recurring focus. One woman appeared beneath headlines describing her as a “former SA inmate and convicted fraudster“, as though that was the defining fact readers needed before hearing her evidence.

Another spent time being questioned about offences entirely unrelated to the allegations against Screpanti. Defence counsel suggested she was “quite capable of calculated and sustained deception” because of her past offending.

Eventually she became visibly distressed. “I’m not on trial again,” she said. “Why am I being questioned about that?”

It is a question that reaches far beyond one courtroom. Before many criminalised women can be heard about the violence done to them, they are expected to account for every wrong they have ever committed. Their criminal history becomes the lens through which their evidence is assessed, as though a conviction permanently diminishes their capacity to tell the truth.

It reflects a deeply embedded belief that criminalisation permanently contaminates credibility. Once someone has been convicted of a crime, particularly a “serious offence”, they become permanently suspect, even when they are the victim of violence.

We rarely apply that logic elsewhere.

Politicians, police officers, corporate executives and public figures who have lied or acted dishonestly are not automatically presumed incapable of telling the truth about every unrelated matter for the rest of their lives. Yet women in prison are routinely treated as though their criminal history follows them into every interaction, every disclosure and every courtroom.

The effect is devastating because it ignores the reality of prison itself.

Profound power imbalance

Prisons are among the most unequal environments our society has created. Employees of the prison system exercise enormous authority over every aspect of daily life. They decide when women leave their cells, where they work, who they see, whether they receive disciplinary reports, and often make recommendations that influence parole and progression through the prison system.

There are few relationships in Australian society characterised by such profound inequality of power.

That imbalance does not disappear because someone appears to cooperate with an employee of the prison system. It is the backdrop against which every interaction takes place.

Women know this better than anyone.

They know that reporting abuse inside prison carries risks that most people will never have to contemplate. They may have to continue living in the same institution where the abuse occurred. They know employees of the prison system talk to one another. They know the people responsible for receiving complaints often work alongside the people they are complaining about. They know that reporting violence rarely means escaping the institution that enabled it.

Those fears are not hypothetical.

During the prosecution of former New South Wales correctional officer Wayne Astill, women described threats after reporting abuse. Court proceedings heard allegations that one woman was warned that a negative case note could affect her parole. Another described being threatened with transfer to another prison where she would be assaulted.

Whether those threats are explicit or simply understood, they form part of the reality women navigate before they ever decide whether to report sexual violence.

Every woman in prison watches these cases. She learns not only what happens when an employee of the prison system abuses power, but what happens when a woman reports it. She watches witnesses publicly dismantled, criminal records replayed and motives questioned.

The lesson is unmistakable. Reporting sexual violence may expose the aggressor, but it also exposes the woman herself. That makes every disclosure an act of extraordinary courage.

Yet once women leave the prison gates and enter the courtroom, another form of power begins operating. The criminal legal system quite properly tests evidence. That is its role.

But there is an important distinction between scrutinising evidence and reinforcing the idea that criminalised women are inherently unreliable because they have been imprisoned.

The media can reinforce that distinction or deepen it.

Coverage of these cases has too often foregrounded the women’s convictions while reducing the allegations against employees of the prison system to the background. During the Wayne Astill proceedings, one of the most prominent headlines read: “Convicted baby killer Keli Lane sues NSW government over prison sexual abuse scandal.”

Before readers were invited to consider the allegations against the correctional officer, they were reminded of the complainant’s conviction. The prison officer accused of abusing his authority became secondary to the woman’s criminal history.

Gendered violence

This is what gendered violence looks like inside prison. Women’s imprisonment does not suspend the dynamics that underpin sexual violence outside prison; it intensifies them.

The prison system already authorises forms of sexual intrusion that would be criminal in almost any other setting. Women are routinely required to remove every item of clothing, expose intimate parts of their bodies and submit to strip searches in the name of security.

While prisons continue to justify these searches as necessary to prevent drugs or contraband entering prisons, the evidence has repeatedly failed to support those claims. What strip searching does achieve is the normalisation of repeated violations of women’s bodily autonomy as an ordinary function of imprisonment.

That matters because institutions do not draw the neat distinctions they often claim to. When the state routinely authorises invasive, unwanted exposure of women’s bodies, it creates a culture in which bodily boundaries become blurred and violations are normalised. Sexual violence committed by an employee of the prison system does not emerge in a vacuum. It occurs within an institution that already claims extraordinary rights over women’s bodies and routinely exercises them.

A male staff member is granted institutional authority over women whose liberty has already been removed. The imbalance is not incidental to the violence. It is what makes the violence possible.

If we genuinely want women to report sexual violence in prison, we cannot continue creating conditions where reporting carries such profound personal risk. We cannot ask women to expose themselves to retaliation inside prison only to encounter suspicion and public character assassination outside it.

The Screpanti verdict should never be understood simply as the conviction of one prison employee. It should force us to confront the institutional conditions that made the violence possible, the barriers that prevent women from reporting, the extraordinary courage required for criminalised women to persist despite knowing exactly how their pasts will be weaponised against them, and an institution that already claims extraordinary authority over women’s bodies through practices such as strip searching before expressing shock when some employees carry that entitlement even further.

It should also force us to confront an uncomfortable contradiction. The prison system repeatedly tells the public that one of the purposes of imprisonment is rehabilitation.

Women are expected to confront their past, accept responsibility and demonstrate that they have changed. Yet when a woman later reports sexual violence, that same past is resurrected as evidence that she should not be believed.

The prison system and the criminal legal system cannot simultaneously claim rehabilitation is possible while insisting that a criminal conviction permanently defines a woman’s credibility.

The real question is not why women in prison are reluctant to report sexual violence. It is why we continue to build institutions where reporting demands extraordinary courage while abusing power requires only opportunity.

Until we confront that imbalance, convictions like Enio Screpanti’s will continue to be treated as isolated scandals rather than warnings about a system that makes abuse easier than reporting it.

About the authors

Tabitha Lean is an activist, poet and storyteller. An abolition activist determined to disrupt the colonial project and abolish the prison industrial complex, she’s filled with rage, channelling every bit of that anger towards challenging the colonial carceral state. Having spent almost two years in Adelaide Women’s Prison, 18 months on Home Detention and three years on parole, Tabitha uses her lived prison experience to argue that the criminal punishment system is a brutal and too often deadly colonial frontier for her people. She believes that until we abolish the system and redefine community, health, safety and justice; her people will not be safe. She is a member of the National Network of Incarcerated & Formerly Incarcerated Women & Girls.

Debbie Kilroy OAM was first criminalised at the age of 13 and spent over two decades in and out of women’s and children’s prisons. Driven to end the criminalisation and imprisonment of girls and women, Debbie established Sisters Inside, as well as her law firm, Kilroy & Callaghan Lawyers. An unapologetic abolitionist, Debbie’s activism work centres on dismantling the Prison Industrial Complex and all forms of carceral control and exile. With a firm belief that there should be ‘nothing about us without us’, Debbie established the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls to centre the voices, experiences and aspirations of criminalisation and imprisonment women and girls in order to change the face of justice in this country.

Previously at Croakey