It is curious that rape in prison is not generally considered rape in our supposed “justice” system, at least in terms of how it is documented in data.
TPI has contributed to a national program that documents sexual violence against LGBTQ and HIV-affected persons, but one issue we have brought up is that they never include any data on sexual violence in prisons. They have said they would consider it, but so far the issue has not been addressed in any substantive way.
TPI is not the only organization that objects to the intentional obscuring or covering up of prison rape. Paul Wright notes in his “From the Editor” discussion of the October 2021 issue of Prison Legal News:
For decades the Human Rights Defense Center and other activists have urged the FBI to include prison-based rapes in their crime statistics. They have declined to do so. Including prison rapes in official statistics would likely mean that more men than women are officially raped in the U.S. each year. Based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report that estimated 139,380 rapes were reported to law enforcement in 2018. As this month’s cover story points out, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) indicates each year roughly 200,000 prisoners are victims of sexual assault.
Here, Prison Legal News is only referring to persons according to how they fit into the coercive gender binary of the prison system, which means that almost all trans women in the prison system are counted as “men” in the data. We know that trans women are imprisoned disproportionally, so this also means that accurate data here would also likely show extremely high proportions of trans persons, particularly trans women, in national sexual violence data.
Justice system biases and general cultural stigma determine what and how we document, and those biases certainly result in misrepresentation of the actual rate of violence against trans persons.