Silencing Sexual Abuse and Assault: Immigration Detention Failure to Survivors

• In Event: 2166 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: Table 21: Issues of Race in the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

Prisoner rape is conceptualized in popular culture as an expected consequence of prison life. While American society has prided itself on principles of freedoms and justice for all, the acceptance of prisoner rape undermines the very potential for rehabilitation and integration. Some people accept that prisoners are incarcerated for their inability to conform to societal norms, but deportees are not prisoners and deportation is not punitive. While deportation remains an administrative process of removal from the United States, treatment of deportees, specifically those who experienced sexual abuse, demonstrates how immigrant detention facilities function as a system of punishment. In this paper, I will illustrate the way that detention facilities fail to properly train their staff on sexual abuse prevention, how sexual abuse survivors are silenced in inspection reports, and why these sexual abuse cases are never publicized. I argue that immigration detention facilities operate to protect their institutional interests at the detriment of their detainees, which results in the violation of their human rights.

Author

• Beatriz Aldana Marquez, Texas State University