Review of “Sexual Violence Inside Prisons: Rates of Victimization.”

Elijah Zagorski
Dr. Currans
WGST 202H
11 December 2014

Article Review 3

Wolff, Nancy et al. “Sexual Violence Inside Prisons: Rates of Victimization.” Journal of Urban
           Health : Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 83.5 (2006): 835–848. PMC.          Web. 25 Nov. 2014.

            Nancy Wolff, Cynthia L. Blitz, Jing Shi, Ronet Backman, and Jane A. Siegel explore sexual violence against men in the prison setting along with the frequency of it occurring in their article titled “Sexual Violence Inside Prison: Rates of Victimization.” Their main focus was to bring up and explore the trends that the surveys conducted on inmates in a variety of different prisons throughout America demonstrated. While the authors acknowledge that there are biases within the data collected, there is still reason to make these statements about the correlation between being assaulted once and the likelihood that he (the man who was assaulted) will be assaulted again following the first assault. They examine two types of assault: inmate-on-inmate and staff-on-inmate. The main statement that they are making is that once a man is victimized the chances that he will be assaulted again goes up significantly, creating the victimization effect.

            The study conducted supports the existence of the victimization effect as it surveys prisoners from different geological and demographical prisons and finding similar results. This includes prisons that are co-ed, all-men’s, and all-women’s prisons. From the three different types of prisons surveyed, the one that’s most likely to have sexual violence occur most repeatedly is all-male prisons. These surveys only were able to prove correlation and not causation between the likelihood of repeated assults, though, not allowing further explanation of why there is this trend. The authors analyzed the survey conducted to draw the conclusion that abusive sexual conduct is more likely to occur than nonconsensual sexual acts. To further explain the difference between the two, “[s]exual violence was defined as nonconsensual sexual acts, which consisted of forced sex acts, including oral and anal sex, and abusive sexual contacts” include unwanted touching or other advances (Wolff et al). Their findings make sense given that abusive sexual conduct is able to escalate into nonconsensual sexual acts but it doesn’t always. They also makes the statement that sexual victimization can lead to more violence outside of prisons as it can produce rage, in addition to the individual’s internal struggle with self-harm, drug use, or suicidal ideation.

            The authors explain that the sampling involved questions regarding the past six months of prisoner’s lives within the prison, while also taking into account the victim and the perpetrator’s age, length of time in prison, and race. The study they conducted found that the most likely man to be a victim was the younger, white male maybe incarcerated for his first time; the most likely person to be a perpetrator was an older prisoner who may have served a sentence prior to the current one, who is black. The authors analyzed their data to be able to create a general stereotype of what the scene within prison violence would look like. They also point out that in the male prisons surveyed, the majority of inmates were black or Hispanic, leaving white men as the minority.  They draw these generalizations by using the data they gathered in their surveying.

            This article relates to my blog topic by connecting sexual violence against men in a specific setting: within prisons. This also connects to the course theme of the intersectionality among race, gender, and sexuality. Specifically my topic explores the intersection between gender and sexuality in the sense of sexual violence, but this article also brings race into it. There can be parallels drawn between this article and “Sexual Violence Against Men in Armed Conflict” by Sandesh Sivakumaran as both articles explore men in socially obscure settings. The setting of armed conflict and prisons may be similar to one another as they have less freedom available for the individuals in terms of both sexuality and sexual expression when compared to non-incarcerated people. The difference is that there is more ability to cause physical harm to victims with more dangerous tools in the combat setting than within the prison setting. The article Wolff and her cowriters wrote added more about why this is a problem and why public health care should be worried about it. Victims of these situation is able to generate violence within individuals who may not have previously been violent. The authors state that the prison system has more individuals who contract STIs and HIV than the outside community. This added to my overall knowledge as it provided a greater understanding of the general topic of sexual violence in prisons.