The women’s estate represents just 4-5% of the entire prison population in the UK at any time and women are imprisoned overwhelmingly for non-violent offences.
Women are not drawn to crime – we represent just under 15% of all arrests. We tend to like order, stability and safety, so when crimes ARE committed and we’re sent down it’s inevitable that the significant factors leading to those crimes will involve untreated mental illness, health issues, substance misuse and financial difficulties.
We know that 95% of violent crime is committed by men, so what of that 5% of female violent offenders? In my experience of serving some of my sentence on a lifer’s wing I met women serving life sentences for murder. I can’t speak for every murderer in the prison system of course but every last one of those women – who again, I counted as my friends – were there because they’d killed their male abusers, after months and years of rape, torment and violence. Every. Last. One.
They had no proclivity to kill, nor did they enjoy it. It was purely for survival. I’m telling you this to highlight again that MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT.
Contrast this with male patterns of offending. One of the MOST common reasons men are incarcerated is violent crime, 40% of which are offences against women. Men rape, maim and kill for sport. They enjoy doing it. Tied up in this already atrocious statistic is that a full 18% of men in prison in the UK are there for serious sex offences.
Of this 18% of rapists and paedophiles, guess what? Half of them say they’re women, and they’re routinely moved to the women’s estate, penis and all.
So WHY should a woman serving a short sentence for failure to pay parking tickets have to accept intimidation and terror as part of her already disproportionate punishment? WHY should an 18 year old girl on remand for shoplifting expect the potential for rape and assault by a man in a wig during her stint? WHY do these questions even need to be asked, and WHY after multiple instances of exactly this happening is this policy still being enacted? Is it simply a fear of being called transphobic? You would have thought after Karen White that ship might have sailed, but apparently that’s still a worse prospect than deliberately endangering women and girls.
We have sex segregated prisons because MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT and women have a right to be kept safe from men. The ease with which men claiming transgender status has steamrollered basic safeguarding principles should alarm all of us. Violence in the male estate is not women’s problem to solve.
Women cannot rape. We rarely kill. We do not commit violent crime at the prolific, industrial scale that men do, and we are having our reputations dragged through the mire by the men who would wear our skin. These are not our crimes, and our prisons are no place for these revolting, duplicitous men. We will not stop shouting about this until every last one of these deviants is identified and returned back to the male estate WHERE THEY BELONG.