Sexual Abuse Survivors Deserve Help, Not Punishment

Last month the nation watched, transfixed, as more than a hundred women stood before a Michigan courtroom to describe how Larry Nassar altered their lives with his abuse. They were heard and heeded. The judge listened, the media listened, the world listened, and those girls and women were told that their suffering mattered. Many women who are sexually abused get their day in court, but on a different side of the judge ― when they’re defendants in a criminal case. And their abuse, it seems, counts for little.

About 10 percent of the nation’s 2.2 million prisoners — 219,000 — are women. The Prison Policy Initiative found that the rate of growth of incarcerated women in prisons is the highest it’s ever been. According to the Vera Institute for Justice, the female jail population today is 14 times greater than it was in 1970. Over 13 million more women are under some type of correctional control, like probation or parole.

A staggering number of incarcerated women are victims of childhood sexual abuse. Studies suggest that between 47 and 82 percent of women have endured that crime. Other studies say 94 percent of incarcerated women have been victimized sexually, some as children, others as adults.

Because women have long been lumped in with male prisoners in correctional and prosecutorial planning for years, it’s only recently that researchers culled data that show what’s really happening to incarcerated women. Last year, the Prison Policy Initiative painted the first landscape of female incarceration. What they found was disturbing.

Jail, as opposed to prison, has become a correctional catch basin for women: Sixty percent of women in jail are unsentenced, left behind bars because they are unable to afford bond. The remaining 40 percent of female jail detainees are sentenced but have not been moved to a prison because they are low-risk inmates. In 2016, the Vera Institute of Justice conducted surveys of that jail population and found that 86 percent of them reported being sexually violated before being incarcerated.

Source: huffingtonpost