Quoted from this article - www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-57103702
'Almost 80% of women prisoners in Scotland have a history of significant head injury - mostly through through domestic abuse. Almost all participants in the study, 95%, reported a history of abuse, with more than half reporting sexual abuse in childhood and 46% reporting sexual abuse in adulthood. A history of alcohol or drug misuse was common, and 92% complained of mental health difficulties, with anxiety and depression the most common'.
These are vulnerable women, locked away for mostly low level crimes being imprisoned with transwomen, many of whom have been convicted of sexual offences against women.
This report -
forwomen.scot/03/08/2021/the-status-of-women-in-scotland-prisons/ found that -
• In 2015, the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists (BAGIS) submitted evidence to the Transgender Equality Inquiry undertaken by the UK Parliament’s Women and Equalities Commitiee explaining why it was naive to suggest that “nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this. These vary from the opportunity to have trips out of prison through to a desire for a transfer to the female estate (to the same prison as a co-defendant) through to the idea that a parole board will perceive somebody who is female as being less dangerous through to a [false] belief that hormone treatment will actually render one less dangerous through to wanting a special or protected status within the prison system and even (in one very well evidenced case that a highly concerned Prison Governor brought particularly to my attention) a plethora of prison intelligence information suggesting that the driving force was a desire to make subsequent sexual offending very much easier, females being generally perceived as low risk in this regard.”
• Research conducted on publicly available data by the women’s rights group Fair Play For women, and later confirmed by the UK’s Ministry of Justice, showed that 48% of male prisoners who self-identified as women were jailed for sex offences – compared to less than 20% in the general male estate. It seems clear one of two scenarios is in place here: either transgender people commit sexual offences at a higher rate than other men, or male sex offenders take advantage of the self-identifying aspects of the prison’s trans policy, for the reasons outlined by BAGIS above. Whatever the correct scenario, the outcome for female prisoners who have no choice but to share accommodation with these male prisoners is very bleak.
'Hysterical' it might be but I will fight for the rights of these vulnerable women not to be subject to what is essentially state sanctioned punative rape. I find the lack of empathy towards these women utterly chilling.