Lyralisa Stevens, a transgender inmate in Vacaville, Calif., faces the daily threat of sexual violence behind bars. As a transwoman prisoner, she’s 13 times more likely to be assaulted than a non-trans inmate–and she’s asking the state of California to protect her. In a landmark lawsuit, Stevens wants the state to provide sex-reassignment surgeries for [...]
Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor will not spend a single day in jail for paying to have sex with a 16-year-old runaway on May 6, 2010, who was allegedly forced into prostitution. She was escorted by her trafficker to Taylor’s hotel room in suburban Ramapo, New York, with a black eye and other facial injuries, where he paid $300 to have sex with her.
Building on the latest charges of sexual abuse to come out of T. Don Hutto detention center in Texas (which I blogged about here), Human Rights Watch has issued a scathing indictment of Homeland Security’s utter failure to protect women from abuse and harassment in detention. Since reports of sexual abuse at Hutto surfaced earlier [...]
Days after the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, mentioned in his Throne Speech (yes, in Canada that is what it is called) that his government would ask Parliament to potentially change the English version of the national anthem to be gender-neutral–specifically the “all thy sons command” line– this idea was scuttled due to overwhelming [...]
Linda D’Antuono Fenton, a 34-year-old inmate at the Federal Medical Center-Carswell near Fort Worth, died in 2004 eight days after she was taken comatose from Carswell to the trauma center of a local hospital. She never regained consciousness. The circumstances surrounding her death were loaded with unanswered questions. Now, a federal judge has answered at [...]
Merely two weeks after Roman Polanski issued his first mea culpa to the press since his September 2009 arrest, new allegations against the award-winning director seek to ensure his extradition to the United States.
Having reported on prison issues on and off for the past four years, I’ve heard one recurring refrain from women prisoners across the country: There are never enough feminine hygiene products to go around.
“I was sentenced to spend 18 months in prison as punishment for my crime. Rape was not part of that punishment,” said Marilyn Shirley in testimony before the Prison Rape Elimination Commission, established by Congress in 2003. Shirley, a 42-year-old mother and wife, was brutally raped and sodomized by Michael Miller, a senior guard at a federal [...]
Of all the news I have heard in relation to the recent sexual assault and murder of Chelsea King, a 17-year-old from my community, one quote keeps reverberating in my mind: “She should not have been running alone in the park.” When my son shared that this was the message passed on to him during a teacher’s [...]
