Assault behind bars.

• Author: Durfield, Amber
• Position: Letters - Letter to the editor

Cathy Young's column "Assault Behind Bars" (May) attempts to answer some reasonable questions about prisoner rape by consulting a rather unreason able source. Young's piece relies heavily on the research of Mark S. Fleisher, a former employee of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the author of a much-disputed report in which he asserts that prisoner rape is an anomaly.

As Young notes, Fleisher's preliminary report created controversy because of his strained effort to downplay the problem of sexual violence behind bars. The document--which Fleisher personally released to the press while the sponsoring agency, the National Institute of Justice, insisted that it was not final--failed to meet basic scientific research standards, such as being peer reviewed and including a review of existing academic and scientific literature. Moreover, Fleisher, an anthropologist, did not study prevalence but purported to provide a "cultural and social analysis" of prisoner rape. As a result, his research cannot support his conclusion that prisoner rape is rare.

Reputable scholars and government agencies have found the prevalence, as well as the physical and psychological consequences, of prisoner rape to be tragically significant. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that in 2005 alone more than 6,000 reports of sexual violence in detention were filed. Since this estimate included only cases in which inmates chose to report assaults to corrections officials, the number is just the tip of the iceberg.

Young accuses advocacy organizations of being prone to exaggerating the problems they are trying to...