Sexual victimization against transgender women in prison: Consent and coercion in context

• Author: Valerie Jenness,Jennifer Sumner,Lori Sexton
• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Date: 01 November 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12221

Received: 19 February 2018 Revised: 2 May 2019 Accepted:6 May 2019

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9125.12221

ARTICLE

Sexual victimization against transgender women

in prison: Consent and coercion in context∗

Valerie Jenness1Lori Sexton2Jennifer Sumner3

1Department of Criminology, Law and

Society, University of California, Irvine

2Department of Criminal Justice &

Criminology, University of Missouri—Kansas

City

3Department of Public Administration,

California State University,Dominguez Hills

Correspondence

ValerieJenness, Department of Criminology,

Lawand Society, University of California,

3389Social Ecology II Irvine,CA 92697.

Email:jenness@uci.edu

Fundinginformation

CaliforniaDepar tment of Cor rections and

Rehabilitation

∗Thiswork was supported by the California

Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

(CDCR)and t he Schoolof Social Ecology at the

Universityof California, Irvine. We would like

tot hank the hundreds of transgenderwomen

incarceratedin California pr isons who agreed

tobe inter viewedand shared the details of their

livesfor the purposes of this research. In addi-

tion,we would like to thank the CDCR officials

whofacilitated this work by providing assis-

tance with accessing transgenderwomen in

prisons formen, especially Wendy Still; a team

ofresearch assistants for contributing to data

collectionand Julie Gerlinger for her assistance

with the statistical modeling in this article;

andKitty Calavita, Sarah Fenstermaker, Jody

Miller,and anonymous reviewers for Crimi-

nologyfor providing consequential substantive

commentson t his work.We also thank our

colleague,John Hipp, who provided valuable

counselon t he statisticalmodeling.

Abstract

In this article, we conjoin two long-standing lines of

inquiry in criminology—the study of prison life and the

study of sexual assault—by using original qualitative and

quantitative data from 315 transgender women incarcerated

in 27 California men’s prisons. In so doing, we advance

an analysis of the factors and processes that shape their

experience of sexual victimization in prison. The results

of qualitative analysis of 198 reported incidents of sexual

victimization exhibit a range of types of sexual victim-

ization experienced by transgender women in prison and

reveal the centrality of relationships to their experiences

of victimization. Findings from logistic regression models

buttress the qualitative results, highlighting a factor that

consistently and powerfully indicates vulnerability to

sexual victimization is involvement in consensual sexual

relationships with male prisoners. Together, the data

demonstrate the prominence of intimate partner violence

in prison, complicate the distinction between consent and

unwanted sexual experiences in the lives of transgender

women in prisons for men, and shine a light on the

workings of gender in a total institution that privileges het-

eronormativity at the expense of the safety of transgender

women in prisons for men. We discuss the implications of

our findings in light of timely policy concerns.

KEYWORDS

domestic violence, intimate partner violence, prison, prisoners, rape,

sexual assault, sexual victimization, transgender, violence againstwomen

Criminology. 2019;57:603–631. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/crim © 2019 American Society of Criminology 603

604 JENNESS ET AL.

Prison rape allegations are on the rise in the United States (Rantala, 2018), and it is beyond dispute that

transgender women incarcerated in men’s prisons are at heightened risk for sexual assault and other

forms of sexual victimization. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reveal that more than

one third of transgender prisoners were sexually assaulted in the past year, whereas approximately 4

percent of all prisoners experienced sexual victimization (Beck, Berzofsky, Caspar, & Krebs, 2013).

In California, Jenness and her colleagues found that sexual assault was 13 times more prevalentamong

transgender women in prisons for men than for men in the same facilities (Jenness, Maxson, Matsuda,

& Sumner, 2007; see also Jenness, Maxson, Sumner, & Matsuda, 2010).

As a unique population in a total institution (Goffman, 1961), transgender women behind bars

endure many “pains of imprisonment” similar to those experienced by their male counterparts: loss

of liberty, the deprivation of goods and services of choice, the imposition of a rule-bound regime, and

other universal characteristics of carceral environments (Sykes, 1958). At the same time, the findings

reported in a growing body of literature reveal that transgender women in prisons for men also face

unique challenges born of three institutionalized cultural logics and attendant socially recognizable

binaries: 1) a gender binary in which two (and only two) sex categories (i.e., male and female) and

two (and only two) genders (i.e., men and women) exist and in which transgender women are not

generally recognized as women (Sumner & Sexton, 2016); 2) a carceral state in which sex-segregation

is heavily relied on in the form of men’s prisons and women’s prisons (Britton, 2003; Rafter, 2004),

and in which a genital-based assignment to each type of facility is privileged (Sumner & Jenness,

2014); and 3) relevant to sexual assault, that there is a neat binary between consensual, wanted

sex and forced, unwanted sex (Muehlenhard, Humphreys, Jozkowski, & Peterson, 2016; Weinberg,

2016).

Taking the nexus between these interrelated institutionalized binaries seriously, in this article,

we draw on original qualitative and quantitative data to examine sexual victimization in the lives of

transgender women incarcerated in prisons for men. We focus empirical attention on three central

questions: 1) What kinds of sexual victimization do transgender womenin pr isons formen experience?

2) What shapes the occurrence and manifestation of their sexual victimization by other prisoners?

3) How do transgender women in prisons for men understand and explain the sexual victimization

they experience at the hands of the men with whom they are incarcerated? In response to these

questions, we find that transgender women housed in prisons for men become targets for sexual

assault and other forms of sexual victimization by the men with whom they serve time and, in

many cases, with whom they form both wanted and unwanted sexual, romantic, and marriage-like

relationships.1We argue that the sexual victimization of transgender womenin prisons for men can be

understood as a form of gendered violence: violence against women in the context of sex-segregated

prisons that assume and organize around a gender binary. Related, the results of our analysis of

the incidents of sexual victimization reported to us by transgender women in California prisons for

men reveal that the presumed bright line between consensual sex and nonconsensual sex is often

blurry; likewise, the distinction between wanted and unwanted sex is often difficult to discern. By

advancing these and other findings from our analyses into broader criminological conversations

on prison life, sexual victimization, intimate partner violence, and the gendering of violence, we

respond to recent calls for criminologists to focus empirical attention on lesbian, gay, bisexual,

and transgender (LGBT) populations as they interact with the criminal justice system (Buist &

Lenning, 2016; Mogul, Ritchie, & Whitlock, 2011; Panfil & Miller, 2014; Peterson & Panfil, 2014;

1Although not married in a legal sense, the women we interviewed commonly referred to their romantic and sexual partners in

prison as their “husband” and/or “old man.”