Excellent speech by Rebecca Paul MP demanding immediate action to remove biological males from women's prisons.

[Childrenofthestones]

Great speech.

Most women in prison are traumatised. Many have experienced sexual abuse or rape. Some of those women will find sharing spaces with men extremely triggering. I know girls who cannot even queue for toilets with men in the line - and that is outside prison, so they can leave. What does your daughter say about this?

It adds insult to injury that the unit taken from girls to house these men is named after Josephine Butler.

Honestly, as a prisoner officer in the women's estate, your dd should have heard about Barbie Kardashian. This is basic.

Risk assessments are not worth the paper they're written on if they don't acknowledge that men are men.

And if you think male prisoners don't pose a threat to your daughter because they say they are women, you are in the land of la la.

Ask your daughter whether she'd rather restrain a man or a woman. Women bite more, pull hair more and can be utterly vicious. Men will break your bones. I know which I'd choose. If your daughter says otherwise, I'd be wondering about her honesty.

Properly supervised, no prisoner should be a danger to others.

This is utter (and by utter, I mean complete and utter) bollocks btw. You clearly have zero idea of what you are talking about.

If your daughter has told you this, well ... She is either ridiculously naive and should leave her job or is lying to you.

I’m pretty sure Sturgeon told us about how the SPS individually risk assess each prisoner when Isla Bryson was initially held in a female prison.

I agree with @OpheliaWitchoftheWoods that this is a red line. No male prisoners in female prisons. EVER.

The stories from the States and Canada are horrific and we need to ensure it can never happen here.

And back to the risk assessments, forgive me for being cynical but a service that is able to accidentally release dozens of prisoners by mistake doesn’t fill me with confidence about their competency. And that is without the added risk of activist zealots within the service who want to ensure that TW are housed in female prisons as a matter of principle.

Just to add that when these trans identified male prisoners are risk assessed, we now know that it was not done correctly.

Prisons were risk assessing male prisoners by using the female risk assessment criteria for female prisoners instead of the one designed for male prisoners.

So when someone says they've been risk assessed, I give a lot of side eye!

Eh?

What exactly are you talking about? What female / male risk assessment exactly?

Take this one with a large pinch of salt until further info given would be my advice....

Trans prisoners are like any other prisoner, and they are continually and individually risk-assessed, and there’s a lot of intel that goes into this.

The idea that you can identify men who are going to abuse women with any sort of confidence is absurd. Only a tiny, tiny percentage of men who commit sexual crimes against women ever come to the attention of the state regarding their crimes. What intel could they possibly be using that would give them a good idea of whether or not these individual men are a risk to the vulnerable women in the prison? And that's without even considering how it changes the way women experience prison just to have men around, regardless of how likely the individual men are to assault them.

I've just had a quick search and found these posts but what's been happening in female prisons has been talked about here before rather a lot:
Page 5 | Prisons Judicial Review: Judgement | Mumsnet
Page 13 | Prisons Judicial Review: Judgement | Mumsnet

It also appears that the risk assessment was used to assess risk that female prisoners posed to trans identifying male prisoners, not the risk the trans identifying male prisoners presented to female prisoners:
Page 5 | "Darlington Nurses" vs County Durham and Darlington NHS Trust Tribunal Thread 3 | Mumsnet
Page 33 | Women's 'Private Spaces' | Mumsnet

I have not articulated what I meant very well so I'll try again.

From my understanding, when trans identified male prisoners are risk assessed for inclusion in the female prison estate, they use the criteria for risk assessing female prisoners.

Females and males have different risk profiles, and males as a sex class are a risk to females as a sex class.

When risk assessing for inclusion into a female single sex space, like a prison for women, you ignore the fact that a male prisoner is male you fail at the first hurdle.

If you then use the risk assessment which was designed for use to assess female prisoners to instead risk assess male prisoners, the problem is further compounded.

Thanks. Interesting and from the face of it entirely unsafe.

Will have a look after sleeping!

Plus if the prison officers’ energies weren’t being spent on monitoring male inmates to try to ensure they don’t harm women, they could actually do their job – which, at a women’s prison, should surely be oversight and support of female inmates, who – as others have said – are often extremely vulnerable.

I actually don’t think most women should be sent to prison at all. There are only a tiny minority who commit violent crimes and pose a risk to the public. I certainly don’t think prison is the answer if a woman guilty of a non-violent crime has a family to support.

But if that were the case, I suspect you’d end up with even more male prisoners mysteriously finding their ‘true identity’ come conviction.

The 'there are such a small number of TW, it just doesn't really matter' argument seems to be coming to the fore again. That was one of the intellectually-challenged reasons given in the Kelly judgment wasn-t it.
It is irrelevant whether thwr is 1, 2 or 500 trans-identified males in the female estate. They are male, so they shouldnt be there.
It is irrelevant that some females are also violent. That doesn't mean that violent males (at population level, bigger, stronger etc) should be added to the mix.
It is irrelevant that.
It is irrelevant whether or not trans-identified males are vulnerable. They can be vulnerable in the male estate.
And this whole 'we just have to treat everyone as people' is as meaningless as the 'trans rights are human rights' mantra. Obviously all people are people. And obviously trans-identified people in this country have exactly the same rights as everyone else. What does this add to anything? No one's saying trans people are unicorns ffs. But because they're people, not unicorns, every trans person is either male or female.

According to my brother, who is a prison officer, men are assessed by danger to themselves and others. Women are assessed by vulnerability.

I assume that's why there's no cat a, b, c or d for female prisoners, just open or closed.

It’s not just Downview. There is a man in Bronzefield and a man in Askham Grange that we know about. There are others, but we can’t be sure who they are or where they are. The men in Downview are not supervised at all times when associating with the women as they should be, this was reported in the Sept IMB report. There are more men in the female prisons in Scotland.

Latest equalities report says that there are 275 men who identify as trans in the male estate. MP Alex Davies-Jones said over 95% of TW are in the male estate. So if we round her figure to 96% that means there are 11 men in the female estate - we don’t know if that includes the 5 in Downview (probably not, because the gov keep on insisting that E wing is not part of the women’s estate - even though they do mix).

The Equalities report is bunkum though, and madness lies that way in trying to figure out the numbers - the policy still stands that if they have a GRC they are entered into all systems as female and they do not have to declare a GRC anyway.

Men should not be in female prisons, it’s unlawful, ridiculous and morally repugnant. If 275 can be adequately housed in the male estate, then they all can. Apart from anything else, they are taking resources away from women.

https://archive.ph/bRtDA
This is the shit that happens when you unnecessarily allow men in women’s prisons

Putting the morality to one side, you end up with this sort of shit tying public bodies and the courts in knots.

I'm astounded that there isn't already a raft of male prisoners taking the prison service to court for discrimination. If they can let one type of man in the female estate, why not them?

Another article focusing on the ‘not proven’ verdict for Sutherley.

Quite. I have heard that training for new prison officers can be pretty basic and as the trans lobby have got their claws into management, I’m guessing that little training there is aims to indoctrinate staff to prioritise the feelings of men over the women.

There are accounts from women in prison of being forced to shower with a leering man looking on, being flashed at in the lunch queue and threatened and intimidated by men on ‘association’ time. There have been reports of women who complain being threatened with early release being cancelled or visits from their children stopped.

Any prison officer who thinks there is no problem with men in women’s prisons is either extremely unobservant or indoctrinated.

And yes, very weird for a prison officer not to have heard of Barbie Kardashian. You’d think he’d be firmly in prison lore by now. And his violent paedophile colleague who threatened to rip his little victim’s limbs off to ensure his silence and then suddenly decided he was a woman so he was placed in a low security female prison.

Adam/Graham/Isla Bryson/AnnieBryson is still hoping that he will get moved to the women's estate. I heard a clip of a telephone interview he did with the Daily Record/Sunday a few months ago...he was convinced that the authorities would eventually be forced to move transwomen to women's prisons as well as talking about a sexual relationship he's had with another prisoner.

Trans identifying male prisoners are no more between a rock and a hard place than paedophile prisoners. As you acknowledge both groups are at risk in the male prison estate. The difference is we don't put paedophiles in youth offender institutions to protect their safety at the expense of the children in the YOI. Putting trans identifying men in women's prisons to protect the former from other men is no less illogical than putting paedophile adults in a YOI to protect them from other adults.

Her daughter very obviously doesn't care.

Rubbish. There are men and there are women and never the twain shall be put in the same prison.

She sounds like an idiot.

She just sounds a bit clueless and easily led by TRA propaganda, but she’s probably well meaning enough. I don’t understand how the DD is such an expert on Downview when she doesn’t actually work there though? Is she aware that a female prisoner was sexually assaulted by a “trans woman” male prisoner during the “mixing”? See case of FDJ which went to judicial review. Doesn’t sound that the “supervised mixing” was working then, was it.

I can tell you the staff at Downview aren't happy with have to deal with men in the female estate .