Sexual violence and male prisons: an Australian queer genealogy

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the history of sexual violence in Australian male prisons. It traces a genealogy of sex between incarcerated men from the penal colonies to the 1990s, drawing on a range of criminal justice and sexological and cultural records to show how sexual violence inflected both conceptions and experiences of homosexual prisoners. We outline how these inmates shifted from being perceived as an institutional threat to a victim of the institution, an uneven process propelled by competing and contradictory ideas about the constitution and practice of sexual behaviours, identities and power behind bars.Before the decriminalisation of sex between consenting adult males, Australian authorities tended to emphasise the dangers such men posed in the penitentiary. At its height in the mid-twentieth century, such alarmism culminated in the creation in 1957 of a homosexual-only gaol in Cooma, New South Wales. From the 1970s onwards, and influenced by contemporary gay, feminist and prisoner’s rights movements, ideas about menace slowly gave way to a focus on vulnerability. Political agitators, the judiciary and prison officials increasingly framed gay prisoners as victims of sexual violence, the targets of aggressive heterosexual inmates from whom the state was unwilling or unable to offer protection. This history of sex between inmates, the carceral state and the criminal justice system reveals that the prison was a crucial setting for the public recognition of sexual violence between men. Shifting and unstable concepts that linked the homosexual with danger and violence shows the discursive overlap between sexual violence and men seeking sexual intimacy and the competing and contradictory thinking and practices linking affective desire, identities, sex between men and homosexuality with coercion and risk.