FINDING THE DATA: SEXUAL ASSAULTS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS Seminar

ABSTRACT Investigations of sexual victimisation, committed in custody, have generally proved difficult to research. Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service collects information about all reported sexual assaults in UK prisons and publishes its figures as part of the Ministry of Justice Safety in Custody Bulletins. This seminar introduces a doctoral project which has unique access to the Incident Reporting System (IRS) data. It explores the challenges of gaining access to the data, unscrambling it and coding it for analysis. It provides examples of sexual assault reports from prisons and includes a wide range of behaviour from rape to prisoner on prisoner drug or contraband searches. Analysis of the IRS data is the first attempt at developing a more detailed understanding of the nature and initial responses to reported prisoner on prisoner sexual victimisation in adult men’s prisons in the UK based on the official data.

Speaker information

Prof Jenny Fleming & Jo Wilkinson,THE SPEAKERS Jo is a part time postgraduate research student in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology. She started her doctoral project in 2014 and is supervised by Professor Jenny Fleming. Jo has worked in the policing sector for over 20 years supporting training, standards development and, more recently, establishing the What Works Centre for Crime Reduction as part of the College of Policing. Her previous roles have included writing guidelines for the investigation and prosecution of rape and serious sexual assaults. Jenny Fleming is Jo’s primary supervisor.