Sexual Assault by Wardens and Detainees
Transgender women who are detained in a male lockup (at either the religious office or the police station), or sentenced to prison in male cells, typically face grave dangers to their security. They are regularly stripped down to their boxer shorts in lockup, exposing their breasts to male inmates—a practice that “invites gang rape,” according to an official at a community organization that works with transgender women. [102] Occasionally, transwomen are placed in separate police or prison cells, sometimes due to individual negotiations with police officers or wardens. [103]
Human Rights Watch documented two cases in which transgender detainees were raped by prison wardens, employees of the Malaysian Prison Department. Aina, a transgender woman who was arrested on drug charges in 2006, told Human Rights Watch that she was forced to have sex with the warden at Taiping prison. [104] Erina was imprisoned on an assault charge and held in the men’s ward at Sungai Buloh prison from 1998 to 2000. There, she was forced to have sex without condoms with the warden, “about two times a week,” and with male prisoners. She said, “I complained to the high officers, the sergeant, but they did not take action.” [105]
In other cases, fellow prisoners sexually assault transwomen, who receive no protection from the authorities. In 2009, police carried out a raid on sex workers in the Brickfields neighborhood of Kuala Lumpur and arrested Jenn, a transgender sex worker, along with a group of cisgender female sex workers:
They took us to lockup at Brickfields Police Station. The girls went to the female lockup, and I went to the male lockup. I was abused by the men in the lockup. One of them forced me to perform oral sex on him. The police didn’t know it was happening because they were completely separated from us—the cell was completely closed. [106]
Nisha Ayub, a transgender activist, was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment in 2000 after being arrested under Malacca’s cross-dressing law. When she arrived at the prison, the wardens subjected her to an anal exam. Then, she said,
I was asked to strip naked in front of everyone. They made fun of my breasts, my implants. The wardens actually purposely asked me to show my breasts in front of all the other inmates, [taking me] from one cell to the other cell. It was something that I can’t forget until today. I was actually pleading to the warden, ‘Please don’t do this, please don’t do this,’ but he just ignored me. It was really scary, because those men in there, those other inmates, when they look at me and they look at my breasts, they were screaming and shouting and cheering.
When they put me in the cell, I thought I was safe, but I wasn’t. I met an elderly transgender woman who was there and she told me, ‘Please be careful, make sure you get somebody to protect you.’ But I was so naïve and I didn’t know what was going on.
Nisha’s fellow inmates attacked her and forced her to perform oral sex on them the following morning during the breakfast queue. She told Human Rights Watch that she had grown up in a conservative family, and that this was her first sexual experience:
I was molested by six or seven inmates. They actually forced me to do oral sex with them, and it was done openly. … And when you are in prison, you can cry, you can beg, or whatever, people don’t care. They just do what they want to do. … If they want sex, they want sex.
And from there, I took the advice from the elderly trans woman to get someone to protect me. I met a warden who basically protected me and in return, I had to give him sexual favors. It’s not something that I’m proud to talk about. But, it’s something that I had to do, just to protect myself. [107]