UK police reveals 1,000 rapes since 2010 occurred in prisons: Report

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: News Websites
14 May 00:25

This comes amid increasing worry about prison safety - both for guards and prisoners - with reported overcrowding, lack of staff, and budget cuts.

Prison officers attend a meeting outside Birmingham prison in England on April 1, 2011 (Reuters)

According to exclusive data obtained by The Observer from police in England and Wales, almost 1,000 rapes have been reported to have occurred in prisons since 2010, and 2,336 sexual assaults were reported during the same time, as experts warn that the real numbers for both crimes may be far higher since some go unreported.

Andrew Neilson, director of campaigns at the Howard League for Penal Reform, in response to the investigation, complained about “minimal research – and a worrying lack of coherent and consistently applied policies – in relation to consensual and coercive sex behind bars."

This comes amid increasing worry about prison safety - both for guards and prisoners. Overcrowding, lack of staff, and budget cuts have been triggered by more than 10 years of austerity measures from successive Conservative-led governments in the UK.

The measures left UK prisons “unable to provide safe environments for rising prison populations," per research conducted by Nasrul Ismail, a criminology lecturer at Bristol University.

A government report stated in September that 52% of prisons in England and Wales were overcrowded, as it announced last year a fund of £500 million in an attempt to establish thousands of new prisons for men and women. As of now, there are just under 90,000 people in prison in the UK.

As a result of low staffing, a government probe has been launched to look into staffing problems in the prison system after the number of prison employees fell by 600 in 2021-2022.

With that being said, Neilson said the Howard League urged for more training and guidance to be offered to staff “but we know that many experienced officers have since left the workforce and prisons have struggled to recruit and retain people to replace them."

Over 20,000 assaults reported in just a year

After 2016, the number of reported rapes was rising in correlation with the period when austerity began to kick in. Cuts to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) budgets amounted to £2.4 billion by 2015-2016, according to an analysis by the Prison Reform Trust.

Three reports of sexual assault in 2010 were received by the Durham Constabulary, which jumped to 33 in 2018. Humberside police received reports of sexual violence, which doubled from five to 10 between 2015 and 2018, while Cumbria police witnessed the number of reported sexual assaults go from one in 2014 to eight in 2016.

During 2020 and 2021, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, Greater Manchester police received 18 rape reports in 2020 and Wiltshire police received four in 2022 and three in 2020 after recording just three in the previous seven years.

Custody statistics published by the MoJ recently demonstrated recorded 20,993 assaults in the 12 months to December 2022 - 12% were considered “serious assaults”. An increase of 19% from the previous year was recorded in sexual assault reports, 195 prisoner-on-prisoner sexual assaults were recorded in custody, and 26% was lower than the 265 recorded in 2019.

A Prison Service spokesperson stated, “We take allegations of sexual assault extremely seriously and refer all incidents to the police for investigation. Our £125m investment in security measures is making prisons safer, while we have also introduced round-the-clock prisoner helplines and body-worn cameras for all frontline staff.”

Earlier this year, hundreds of London police officers were likely to be fired for sexual and domestic abuse offenses, Britain's police chief said on January 17, as he fought to recover public faith after an officer admitted to being a serial rapist.