Estimates of the incidence of
sexual coercion in men's prisons are notoriously variable and fraught with
conceptual and methodological problems. In 2006-2007, we conducted a
computer-assisted telephone survey of a random sample of 2,018 male prisoners
in New South Wales and Queensland.
Of 2,626 eligible and available inmates,
76.8% consented and provided full responses. We asked about time in prison,
sexual experience, attraction and (homo/bi/heterosexual) identity, attitudes,
sexual contact with other inmates, reasons for having sex and practices engaged
in, and about sexual coercion, including location and number of perpetrators.
Most men (95.1%) identified as heterosexual.
Of the total sample, 13.5%
reported sexual contact with males in their lifetime: 7.8% only outside prison,
2.8% both inside and outside, and 2.7% only inside prison. Later in the
interview, 144 men (7.1% of total sample) reported sexual contact with inmates
in prison; the majority had few partners and no anal intercourse. Most did so
for pleasure, but some for protection, i.e., to avoid assault by someone else.
Before incarceration, 32.9% feared sexual assault in prison; 6.9% had been
sexually threatened in prison and 2.6% had been sexually coerced ("forced
or frightened into doing something sexually that [they] did not want").
Some of those coerced reported no same-sex contact. The majority of prisoners
were intolerant of male-to-male sexual activity.
The study achieved a high
response rate and asked detailed questions to elicit reports of coercion and
sex separately. Both consensual sex and sexual assault are less common than is
generally believed.
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- 1School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia. j.richters@unsw.edu.au
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