Note: Petition Closed
Fair Play For Women is calling on the government to urgently review prison rules following the sexual assault of two women while in prison by rapist Karen White.
More information on why this is important can be found in this article by James Kirkup in the Spectator.
Fair Play For Women has been pushing hard for more transparency around the risks of trans prison policy on women. We were the first to publish figures on the high number of sex offenders identifying as transgender. Our continued pressure has been instrumental in forcing greater transparency and the MOJ has now released official statistics:
| 60 out of the 125 transgender inmates in 2017 were convicted of sexual offences. |
| 2018 stats show at least 22 male prisoners are living in women’s prisons (that’s 1 in 200 women prisoners in England and Wales are actually male). |
Prison experts have also spoken out condemning the policy:
Andrea Albutt, president of the Prison Governors Association said in June 2018: “I have seen women feeling very threatened by transgender prisoners’ presence. Women prisoners are very vulnerable.”
Frances Crook of the Howard League, a prison reform campaign, has said that she is worried that ‘some men with a history of extreme violence and sexual violence against women have found a new way of exercising aggression towards women’.
The British Psychological Society has said this: “psychologists working with forensic patients are aware of a number of cases where men convicted of sex crimes have falsely claimed to be transgender females for a number of reasons”
Dr James Barrett of the British Association of Gender Identity Specialists has said this: “It has been rather naïvely suggested that nobody would seek to pretend transsexual status in prison if this were not actually the case. There are, to those of us who actually interview the prisoners, in fact very many reasons why people might pretend this”
Richard Garside of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies has written this article saying “My concern about the current approach is that it is appears to privilege the subjective feelings of particular, largely male, prisoners, at the expense of the needs of those prisoners, largely women, who have to live with the decisions imposed upon them.”
The prison policy was created in 2016 following external consultation with transgender campaign group Gendered Intelligence. Advocates for female prisoners were not included. This policy is not fit for purpose and needs urgent and transparent review.