“Trans-identified males who have criminal histories of violence and aggression, including sexual violence, are being placed in women’s prisons,” Kitzul said.
One third of Canada’s gender diverse inmate population has been convicted of sexual offenses. Almost all are biological men who identify as women and their victims were mostly children (58 percent) and females (55 percent), according to the latest Correctional Service Canada report on gender diverse offenders.
When Canada started admitting male-bodied prisoners to women’s prisons in 2017, Heather Mason was an inmate at the Grand Valley federal prison in Kitchener, Ont. “I began to hear about the experiences of my friends, who faced violence and sexual harassment from male transfers. Even after I was released, the incidents told to me only grew in number and severity,” she wrote in a foreword to the report.
Unique Rehabilitation of Women
Women commit different crimes than men—mostly acquisitive and property crimes rather than violent crimes, expert testimony in the report says. Incarcerated women have also experienced higher levels of poverty and abuse than men, especially sexual abuse.Canada overhauled its women’s prison system to differentiate it from the men’s in the 1990s after high levels of suicide among female inmates. By 2010, 193 other countries had followed suit, Phoenix said, by following the United Nations guidance on the matter, commonly called the “Bangkok Rules.”
“These state that providing for the distinct needs of women is necessary and that doing so ’shall not be considered discriminatory,'” Pheonix said. “The rules also help countries understand their responsibilities in preserving the dignity of women, particularly regarding ... high risk of rape, sexual assault, and humiliation that women can experience—including being watched when dressing, showering, or in the bathroom.”
Incarcerated women who are retraumatized by the presence of male bodies in these spaces—or in rehabilitation programs that may be discussing male violence—cannot leave or escape, Phoenix said.
Women tend to retreat to their cells and self-harm in these situations, said Patricia Craven, a former prison governor in the U.K., in a foreword to the report.
“In my experience, the dynamic of a female-only environment changes dramatically even when only one male is present. Some women vie for male attention but many more shun it,” she said. They exclude themselves from activities, such as work and education, meant to contribute to their rehabilitation.
The security level of women’s prisons are different than men’s—fewer restrictions have been needed in the women’s system. If a different demographic comes in and changes the nature of the prisons, higher security may be needed, to the detriment of a system that has hitherto worked in the favour of the women, said Kitzul.
There must be a balancing of transgender rights with women’s rights, Phoenix said. However, many advocates for transgender inmates entering women’s prisons argue, she said, that “trans rights are human rights.”
“Human rights, by their very nature, often conflict with each other,” she said. “There is no legal basis for claiming that one protected group’s rights always trump another group’s rights.”
Vulnerability
Phoenix said statistics do show transgender inmates in U.S. male prisons at high risk of sexual assault. But there are no statistics to support the same understanding in Canada or other peer countries. And academics often talk of “American penal exceptionalism” because the U.S. prison system is “fundamentally different.”What the limited data in Canada shows is that various groups of people are vulnerable to sexual abuse in prison. People with mental illness and cognitive impairments, for example, are at a greater risk than transgender people, according to data from the Office of the Correctional Investigator (OCI).
The reporting on sexual violence in Canada’s prisons has been lacking, something Correctional Service Canada has sought to remedy with improved reporting protocols in the past couple of years. Incidents of sexual violence, inside and outside of prison, often go unreported.
The OCI analyzed the limited reports available from 2014 to 2019. It found 67 reports with 73 victims and 66 assailants. LGBTQ prisoners account for 15 percent of victims and 30 percent of assailants.
Correctional Service Canada told The Epoch Times via email it does not record incidents of sexual violence specifically involving transgender prisoners.
Kitzul said her experience working in men’s prisons in Canada was that inmates who identified as women were not necessarily targeted.
“In my experience, there is a very distinct hierarchy in prison culture that dictates vulnerability,” she said. “At the top of the hierarchy are gang members and their associates, drug dealers and cop killers. … At the bottom of the hierarchy are sexual offenders. … So, if a trans-identified male inmate happens to also be a sexual offender, then he will indeed be harassed and threatened—not because he is transgender, but because he is a sexual offender.”
She continued, “That isn’t to say that transgender inmates never get assaulted or verbally disrespected, but for the most part they are generally ignored and some get along quite well in the inmate population.”
She said gay inmates are, arguably, no more safe than transgender ones. “The risk to gay inmates is managed within the men’s prison, and in my view can also be done for transgender inmates.”
Phoenix and others cited in her report say more study needs to be done and more data collected on the transgender population to understand solutions. Creating a separate space for transgender inmates may be one solution.
“There is no scholarly evidence about the impact on transgender offenders of giving them a choice of where they are accommodated or of accommodating transgender women who are anatomically male in women’s prisons,” Phoenix said. “But we do have a mounting number of specific instances where women have been directly harmed as a result of such policies.”
