- Monday, May 20, 2024
The prison staff get huge hush money regularly from the accused for ‘supplying’ female inmates.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Supreme Court of India was informed earlier in February that 62 babies were born in prisons across the eastern state of West Bengal in the last four years while 181 children were currently with their mothers in various prison facilities. The apex court also learned that most of the women prisoners were already pregnant at the time of their arrival in the jails. In some cases, they came back expecting after getting released on parole or bail.
Gaurav Agarwal, a senior advocate assisting the top court as an amicus curiae in a matter titled ‘Inhuman conditions in 1,382 prisons’, told the court that he got information from additional director general and inspector general of correctional services, West Bengal, about children born to women prisoners in custody.
Agarwal filed an application in a matter related to alleged inhuman conditions prevailing in prisons and sought the Supreme Court’s directions in light of reports that suggested that quite a few women prisoners in Bengal got pregnant in custody.
The matter has not popped up suddenly.
In 1990, when Tapas Kumar Bhanja, a lawyer, was asked to investigate conditions in Bengal’s overcrowded prisons, he was shocked by his discoveries. According to Bhanja who is now 66, women in prisons were sexually abused by male inmates and many of the victims gave birth to babies as a result, The Guardian reported.
Mohona (name changed) was in her early teens almost 25 years ago when the well-to-do family she worked for as a domestic aid reported her to the police, accusing her of theft. The woman, who has a speech disability, was held for a month in an adult prison and then taken by two police officers in a van to the court for appearance.
While returning, Mohona was blindfolded and raped by the two officers and the driver of the vehicle. Communicating with The Guardian, she indicated that she was froze as they pinned her down and removed her clothes. She was sent to a government shelter where she gave birth to a girl eight months later.
It’s 34 years since he started his first investigation and Bhanja fears the situation in India’s prisons is worse now.
“Sexual abuse of incarcerated women is still a reality in West Bengal,” he was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
“Women are being sexually assaulted in custody. As recently as in early 2020, over a dozen incarcerated women I interviewed in West Bengal told me privately that they were all assaulted in custody and became pregnant.”
The state, which is ruled by India’s only woman chief minister, has a sole prison for women, called a ‘correctional home’. It means nearly 1,900 women prisoners are kept in sections of men’s prisons and find themselves at the mercy of influential inmates who have access to other areas.
Bhanja said the abuse begins the very day the women are sent to the prisons as they cross the male wards to enter the women’s areas.
On February 8, Bhanja gave his findings, backed by hundreds of interviews with women prisoners — to the high court in Kolkata, the state capital, in a formal request for judicial intervention called a writ petition. The Indian Supreme Court expressed concerns over the veteran lawyer’s report soon after.
While describing the “inhuman” conditions in which the prisoners in the state were living, Bhanja also claimed that women inmates were becoming pregnant in custody despite the absence of a law that allows conjugal visits to prisoners.
When the top court sought further information, the West Bengal Correctional Services said that 62 children had been born in the state’s prisons between January 2020 and December 2023. According to the authorities, most of the women became pregnant at the time of their arrival while others became pregnant during their short periods of parole.
The state government called Bhanja’s allegations as a “slur” on the women prisoners. Laxmi Narayan Meena, additional director general of correctional services in Bengal, said the charges were “incorrect, motivated and demeaning”.
The allegations do not surprise Bhanja who said many heads would roll if these abuses come in public. He also claimed that members of the prison staff pocket huge hush money regularly from the convict officers.
He said a complete overhauling is needed to stop the menace in the prisons, including setting up of jails exclusively for women.
According to Pallabi Ghosh, the founder of the anti-trafficking charity Impact and Dialogue Foundation, sexual violence towards women prisoners is “very, very common”.
“One of the trafficking survivors I worked with was formerly held in a prison in India – but outside West Bengal. She said that the women inmates there, including her, were regularly ‘supplied’ to powerful male inmates,” she was quoted as saying by The Guardian.
“However, it is terribly difficult to gather any kind of data in this area,” she said, adding that women who have faced sexual abuse in custody are too scared to speak out as they fear violent retaliation by the influential and those who abused them.
“Based on three decades of experience interviewing incarcerated women in this state, I strongly suspect that most women inmates who give birth in prisons in West Bengal do so after getting pregnant while in custody,” Bhanja told the news outlet.
American human rights activist Aryeh Neier who co-authored a 1991 report on prison conditions in India, documenting the horrific reality of rape in custody and consequent pregnancies, says he is not surprised by the fact that the abuses he reported more than three decades ago are still prevalent.
“This should be a source of national embarrassment,” Neier, who co-founded Human Rights Watch, said.
A report on women prisoners by India’s ministry of women and child development in 2018 said that violence against imprisoned women — “including sexual violence by inmates and authorities” – had been reported from all over the country.
“However, official reports remain underestimated due to fear in prisoners of retaliation as they are forced to stay in the same place as their perpetrators,” it added.
Experts say it is the women from the most economically and socially marginalised sections who are vulnerable to sexual abuse in custody.
An official from a Delhi-based organisation, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the issue, said the prisons maintain strict power structures, placing women from marginalized communities at higher risk of exploitation by sexual predators.
(With PTI inputs)
