Rape in Prison : Male vs Males

Have you ever heard the saying " Night, night, sleep with your but hole tight?" or "Don't drop the soap"or something close to that? What do you think when you hear violence, Rape and sexual abuse and such? Many of us probably don't consider that men also face these as well as women. Maybe because men are stereotyped as being masculine and dominant and having more power than a women. As we all know, in prison cells men are victims of violence and are raped. So why do you think that men are raped in prisons anywyas? Is is because there is no female there to satify their sexual needs?



Sex, Violence and Power

Rape in prison is rarely a sexual act, but one of violence, politics, and an acting out of power roles.-- Journalist and prisoner Wilbert Rideau, in "The Sexual Jungle"⁽²⁶⁶⁾

Of course rape is a crime of hatred. I'm ugly as a mud fence, why would W.R. want to have sex with me?

-- A Texas inmate, October 8, 1998.

http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/prison/report5.html#_1_36

Here are some excerpt from that I picked out that I think are very interesting and deal a lot with what we have been talking abo9tu over the semester.

• Locked in an all male society, lacking other sexual outlets, prisoners might be assumed to commit rape as a means of sexual release. Yet the cruelty and degradation so intimately connected to rape in prison undermines this facile explanation, suggesting that inmates' real motivations for committing rape are more complicated.

^I guess this paragraph is saying that many people think that since in prisonm there are no women around they turn to rape of another inmate ( male) to act out and replace the feeling.

• People in prison are deprived of sex, but perhaps even more fundamentally they are deprived of almost all choice in or power over their lives. The most basic decisions affecting them--what to eat, when to get up, where and with whom to live--are outside of their control. As Louisiana prisoner and writer Wilbert Rideau has pointed out, "The psychological pain involved in such an existence creates an urgent and terrible need for reinforcement of [the prisoner's] sense of manhood and personal worth."⁽²⁷⁰⁾ One means of doing so is by establishing absolute power over another prisoner via rape

^This is a way for the Rapist to can some kind of control over their victim. It's sad really how they can not escape and run away. Because it is a prison and so they really have no where to go. Even if the tell teh police people, I don't think that they would even do anything that would help the victim. I could be wrong. I don't know enough about this matter.

• Numerous prisoners confirmed this portrayal of rape as a means of expressing power in a situation of powerlessness. Explained a Virginia inmate: "In my view the perpetrator of rape is an angry man. He lacks power and decides to steal it from others through assault." Interestingly, this same inmate drew a correlation between the imposition of a more oppressive prison regime, in which officials treat prisoners unfairly, and the likelihood of a sexual assault. He explained that he had noticed that "the more oppressive the system the higher the incidents of assaultive behavior in general . . . . Fair and objective treatment seems to create a less-assaultive environment."⁽²⁷¹⁾ Indeed, if prisoners' quest for dominance over others is to some extent a consequence of their lack of power in every other area of life, then it stands to reason that a harsher and more arbitrary prison regime would exacerbate the tendency.

^This goes back to what we have been talking about the one week how power and dominance and oppression can leave a peson without any power and the dirt kind of.

• Still, to think that there is a strict dichotomy between rape as a sexual act and rape as a violent assertion of power may be somewhat misguided. Rapists are, in the most obvious ways, sexually stimulated by what they are doing. "[N]o matter how one characterizes it, i.e., 'control'; 'violence'; 'rage' etc.," suggested a Colorado inmate, "it is sexuality."⁽²⁷⁵⁾ The fact that the victim of rape is injured and degraded may itself be a source of sexual arousal to the rapist. Daniel Lockwood, an expert on prison rape, has posited that sexual aggression in prison can be traced to men's sexist attitudes toward women, which, in prison, translate into a bias against men placed in female roles.⁽²⁷⁶⁾ The fact that stereotypically feminine characteristics are so despised in male prisoners may reflect a more general contempt of women, not just men who are considered to be like women. Although misogyny would appear to be an unlikely cause of male-on-male rape, it may be an ingredient in the volatile mix that results in sexual abuse in prison.

I never really thought about rape in prison in this kind of way. I really only thought about it as they wanting a sexual feeling and or the person was gay. Maybe it is the media portyes it in the movies. This topic talks about some of the things we discussed in calss a few weeks back in the begining of the semester.