The older authority figure wins the
trust of the young target by cultivating a false friendship, having
heart-to-heart conversations, giving gifts, offering protection. And then the
sex ensues, sometimes forced, sometimes seemingly consensual.
It is a classic predatory tactic known as “grooming,”
and no one familiar with it could have been terribly surprised when a new
report from the U.S. Department of Justice declared that young people in the
country’s juvenile detention facilities are being victimized in just this way.
The youngsters in custody are often deeply troubled, lacking parents, looking
for allies. And the people in charge of the facilities wield great power over
the day-to-day lives of their charges.
What was a genuine shock to many
was the finding that in the vast majority of instances, it was female staff
members who were targeting and exploiting the male teens in their custody.
The phenomenon -- a particularly
unexamined corner of the nation’s long-troubled juvenile justice system –
presents an array of challenges for those concerned about better protecting
young people in custody: encouraging male teens to understand such sex is, in
fact, a crime, that it is never really consensual, and that its long term
effects can be seriously harmful; requiring corrections officials to stop
blaming the young boys and meaningfully punish the female staffers; and
establishing standards of conduct meant to end the abuse.
“Many corrections leaders continue
to minimize this abuse, arguing that it’s the kids who are manipulating the
staff, that these boys are asking for it,” said Lovisa Stannow, executive
director of the California-based nonprofit Just Detention International, which
advocates for the elimination of prison rape. “That’s simply not good enough.”
The Justice Department first
discovered the startling form of abuse in 2010, when it surveyed more than 9,000
youngsters living in juvenile halls and group homes. More
than 10 percent of the respondents said they’d been sexually abused by
staff and 92 percent said their abuser was female.
In the last three years, the
numbers haven’t changed much.
The Justice Department released its
second
report last
month, and this time researchers surveyed more than 8,700 juveniles housed
in 326 facilities across the country. In all, the facilities house more
than 18,000 juveniles, representing about one quarter of the nation’s total
number of youngsters living in detention centers.
Drawing on their sample, Justice
Department researchers estimate that 1,390 juveniles in the facilities they
examined have experienced sex abuse at the hands of the staff supervising them,
a
rate of nearly 8 percent. Twenty percent who said they were victimized by
staff said it happened on
more than 10 occasions. Nine
out of 10 victims were males abused by female staff.
Nearly
two-thirds of the abused youngsters said that the officials lured them into
sexual relationships by giving them special treatment, treating them like a
favorite, giving gifts and pictures.
Twenty-one percent said staff
gave them drugs or alcohol in exchange for sex.
Stannow said that the rate of abuse
perpetrated by female guards on male victims is the result of a “dangerous combination”
of cultural and institutional problems, not the least of which is the fact that
women forcing males into sex does not comport with society’s conventional
definition of rape.
“When you have an extreme power
differential and absolute unchecked power, bad things start happening,” Stannow
said. “When you combine this with a culture where sex abuse by females on males
isn’t taken seriously, then you have the perfect set-up for women with all this
power to get away with it.”
Stannow and others say that the
young male victims themselves may not even consider their relationships with
women to constitute sex abuse. They might consider it consensual because they
didn’t actively fight off their abusers.
“The biggest concern for me is what this
means they’re not getting inside detention, which is a positive relationship
with adults and with authority figures. They’ve not learned what those positive
relationships should be like, and, for many, they’ve never had them in their
life,” said Michele Deitch, an attorney and senior lecturer at the University
of Texas’s School of Public Affairs in Austin.
“These boys aren’t getting the
kinds of treatment and programming that are supposed to make them more
productive citizens and healthier youth,” said Deitch, who focuses on improving
safety conditions in prisons and juvenile detention centers. “Many have
experienced trauma their entire lives and now this is just more trauma for them
to deal with.”
Reggie Wilkinson, the former
director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said that
consensual sex between a corrections officer and an inmate is impossible given
the power imbalance between the two.
But he also said that, in some
cases, both female guards and the boys they molest share some responsibility.
“There’s no such thing as
consensual sex when you are supervising someone, regardless of their age, but
the reality of it is that some of the guys in prison are very persuasive and
some of the women are very persuasive,” Wilkinson said.
“I’m not sure anybody has got a
real handle on why the Bureau of Justice Statistics is finding these kinds of
numbers, but it’s on the radar screen of a lot of people.”
Wilkinson and Stannow agree that it
is important to keep women as detention facility personnel. They often do great
work. But the predators, they say, must be identified, halted and prosecuted.
“I think in many cases female staff
are better suited than males,” Wilkinson said. “A good mix of staff is what we
always want. That so-called motherly impact is a big deal and women who are
stern but fair with the inmates I think can perform that job as well as any
male could.”
Source: http://ow.ly/osvCg
