‘No more men in female jails’, say women’s groups after trans inmate sex assault
A leading women’s group has written to Anthony Albanese and premiers demanding that male offenders no longer be permitted to enter women’s prisons under the guise of ‘gender identity’.
Australia’s peak women’s rights body has written to Anthony Albanese and every state premier protesting “a national pattern of state-sanctioned injustice and abuse, whereby male offenders are being permitted to enter women’s prisons under the guise of gender identity”.
“This practice is dangerous, dehumanising and in direct violation of international human rights standards,” Women’s Forum Australia chief Rachael Wong wrote in her letter.
The plea comes after the revelation by The Weekend Australian that a female inmate in South Australia’s Port Augusta Prison had been placed in a cell with a violent transgender prisoner who sexually assaulted her.
“Katie”, the 29-year-old woman, was forced to share a cell with Krista Richards, previously known as Leslie Graham Richards, convicted almost a decade before of the attempted assassination of an Adelaide bikie chief.
Prison authorities had previously housed the former would-be hitman in a single occupancy cell because they knew the then 69-year-old had a history of perpetrating violence against women.
“What happened to Katie is every woman’s worst nightmare – and it happened inside a women’s prison, sanctioned by the state,” Ms Wong told The Australian. “This is not an isolated failure but part of a growing national human rights crisis where male offenders are being housed alongside vulnerable female prisoners.”
Ms Wong was particularly critical of the response Katie received to a formal complaint she lodged last week with the SA Correctional Services Department, asking for the record of her original complaint to be released to her. “She was disgracefully told she would need to request the documents under Freedom of Information laws with no indication of whether her complaint would be investigated,” Ms Wong said .
“What is unfolding in our prisons is a moral stain on Australia’s justice system. The question now is whether our leaders will act before another woman is sexually assaulted.”
The call for action follows The Australian’s report two weeks ago that a trans-identified male offender who sexually abused his five-year-old daughter has been placed in the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, Victoria’s largest women’s prison.
The court accepted arguments that the offender’s gender dysphoria and struggles with transition diminished his culpability and he committed the abuse in part to be validated as a woman, framing his crimes as those “commonly seen in females charged with sexual offences”.
In many states and territories, corrections policies provide for inmates to be housed based on gender identity rather than sex.
“These policies are compounded by state and territory sex self-identification laws, which permit individuals to easily change their legal sex on their birth certificate,” said Ms Wong.
“Together, these frameworks strip prisons of the ability to maintain female-only facilities, allowing men who self-identify as women to be housed in women’s prisons.”
At the federal level, the 2013 amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act removed the biological definitions of “man” and “woman” and introduced “gender identity” as a protected attribute, Ms Wong said.
These amendments coupled with the Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s public representations – including submissions in the high-profile women’s rights case Tickle v Giggle – advance an interpretation of the law that prioritises gender identity over biological sex.
“This approach undermines the very sex-based protections the act was intended to secure and has enabled and empowered state and territory laws and policies that allow male offenders who identify as women to be placed in women’s prisons, placing women at serious risk of harm, and indeed causing them devastating abuse and trauma,” Ms Wong said.
“The Australian Human Rights Commission’s silence in the face of this abuse is unconscionable. The commission has prioritised ideology over women’s human rights.”
Ms Wong called on the Prime Minister and premiers to immediately remove all male offenders from women’s prisons in every state and territory across Australia and to conduct independent inquiries into how such placements were ever permitted.
The Sex Discrimination Act must also be reformed to restore the biological definitions of “man” and “woman” and reinstate sex-based protections for women and girls, she said, while the HRC must “return to its proper mandate of upholding universal human rights rather than enforcing ideology”.
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