Sex has always had an important role in our personal decision making. There are few people willing to give it up, but sometimes we are forced by law, like the one stating that in prison (in many countries, Italy included) conjugal visits are not an innate right.
Some people even associate prison sex with the TV serie Oz, where gangs like The Aryan Brotherhood fight the Muslims or The Gays are often targeted by The Christians.
Other people picture it like in the female facility of Orange Is the New Black where Piper Chapman reconnects with Alex Vause, her international drug trafficking old flame, with whom she travelled the world before ending up with her current boyfriend Larry.
About 31 of the 47 states included in the Council of Europe permit conjugal visits based on different terms. In 2016 an Italian penal reform proposed the introduction of Love Rooms. The new reform could guarantee sexual care for the detainee and their families, ending once for all the current malpractice toward both sexes equally. However, despite Judge Felice Casson’s good intentions, the new law does not validate the need of same sex intimacy within the Italian penal facilities [L’Espresso].
On the opposite side of the world, specifically in the United States, The Williams Institute of UCLA published the first comprehensive study on incarcerated LGB (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual) in the country. The research, led by senior scholar Dr. Ilan H. Meyer, wants to raise awareness of the risks this population of about 238 thousand sexual minorities held in prison is facing.
The study highlights how the presence of LGB inmates is greater than what was initially estimated. It also noted a greater number of lesbians and bisexual women compared to gay and bisexual men.
The study took into consideration a few quantifiers; from the population of both jails and prisons, finding gay, bisexual and heterosexual men that had a homosexual experience prior to the incarceration were 6.2 %, opposed to the 35.7% of women; while prison percentages increase for men to 9.3% and to 42.1% for women.
It also reported that compared with straight inmates, sexual minorities were more likely to have been sexually victimized as children, a leading factor to poor mental health for over 30% of men and women alike. The statics of gay or bisexual people sexually abused during childhood prove to be 33% in men and 53.7% in women, compared to the pale 6% of heterosexual men and the still abounding 31.4% of women. Furthermore, as shown by the 17.5% of men and 13.1% women surveyed, LGB people, of either sex, are at higher risk to be persecuted and abused by both cellmates and guards.
For some people, sexual fantasies taking place in prison are exciting, but we should keep in mind that even if prison nature deviates from the outside world’s rules, non-consenting sex is violence. Polish writer Stanislaw Jerzy Lec once said: “In countries where men do not feel safe in prison, they do not feel even safe in freedom”.
Lyas
translation by Barbara Burgio
©2017 Il Grande Colibrì
