State-sponsored sexual assault?

Dale Mills

A complaint by prisoners' pressure group Sisters Inside led to a 20-month inquiry that found that in a four-year period, 41,728 strip searches were performed on women in Queensland's prisons. Only two searches found "significant contraband". Sisters Inside says that this practice is akin to state-sponsored sexual assault.

The report, by Queensland's Anti-Discrimination Commission, condemned the number of strip searches carried out on low-security prisoners, as well as those carried out on women in crisis intervention and detention units. This especially applied to low-security women prisoners held in high-security prisons, which the report said was "unreasonable and unacceptable".

The searching of women in crisis intervention support units is especially distressing as many are mentally ill. The March 7 Courier-Mail quoted the corrective services minister, who said that Queensland's policy on strip searching is in line with other Australian jurisdictions.

[More information can be found at <http://www.sistersinside.com.au>. The Queensland Anti-Discrimination Commission's Women in Prison Report can be found at <http://www.adcq.qld.gov.au>.]

From Green Left Weekly, March 15, 2006.

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From GLW issue 660