The Times- Why was convicted paedophile allowed to move to a female jail?
Why was convicted paedophile allowed to move to a female jail?
Like most other women’s jails, HMP New Hall, near Wakefield, reflects the fact that women behave better towards each other than men. There are no Victorian wings with rows of cells. Instead the prisoners, even the high-security ones, mix freely together in what inspectors called a “fundamentally safe and respectful” place, with “very few” locked up during the core prison day.
Showers and some “rooms,” as New Hall calls cells, are also shared. There are even children: a mother-and-baby unit accommodates up to 10 infants aged under two.
Into this safe and respectful environment was placed a convicted paedophile who was on remand for multiple rapes, with a long record of other sexual and violent offences committed, as a man, against women.
Yet Karen White, formerly known as Stephen Wood, then as David Thompson, told the authorities she now identified as a transgender woman and wanted to be sent to a women’s prison. Remarkably, even though her full offending record was available to them, her male body was fully intact and she had undergone no physical transition or legal change of gender, they agreed.
Within days of arrival at New Hall, White sexually attacked female inmates, committing four such assaults before being moved to a men’s jail. The whole saga finally became public last week, when White pleaded guilty to the last of the rape charges.
Today a friend of one of Wood’s rape victims tells The Sunday Times she is “furious and absolutely flabbergasted” at the failures of the Prison Service.
The friend, Melissa Briscoe, recounts the rape victim’s story: “He turned up one evening with a bottle of vodka. She didn’t drink any, but she thinks that he spiked her soft drink. She came to find me to tell me what had happened. She was very distressed, crying and shaking. I took her straight down to the police station.”
“The last thing she remembers was falling asleep. When she came to, she found Stephen Wood raping her. He’d said he was going to help her, get her settled. He’d set himself up as a confidant.”
At the time, Wood was out of prison on licence after serving part of an 18-month sentence for abusing a primary school child. He was staying at the Birch Lane probation hostel in Manchester, where Briscoe was a staff member. The rape victim was visiting one of the other offenders in the hostel.
Briscoe, who also knew Wood and had access to his record, said there was “no sign at all that he was trans”, describing him as a “very manipulative” person who would “develop relationships with vulnerable residents in the hostel and befriend them”. He repeatedly breached his probation conditions, she said, and was not recalled to prison after the rape.
Briscoe, now a senior therapist at a charity, said Wood had a history of seeking access to mixed and women’s institutions to find and abuse vulnerable people. As well as the bail hostel and the prison, she said, police told her Wood had gained admission to a mixed psychiatric ward, where he had repeatedly raped a young woman patient suffering from Asperger’s syndrome.
Further, non-sexual crimes committed by Wood include stabbing his neighbour and committing severe physical violence against his former partner, her daughter and his son. A restraining order prevented him from contacting the son until he turned 18.
Briscoe said that, as well as the police report, she had “made a formal written report” of the Manchester rape to Wood’s probation officer and ensured that it appeared on his file. “The authorities knew all this. They knew everything about him before they sent him to New Hall,” she said. “That is why I cannot believe what they did.”
How could it have happened? Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said prison managers had to make decisions about trans offenders “in a toxic political environment where some campaigners are pushing very hard on trans rights.
“I am asking them to err on the side of caution, because there is emerging evidence that certain men are jumping on the trans bandwagon to access, and harm, very vulnerable women in prison.”
Trans campaigners insist that anyone who identifies as female is a woman, must be treated as such and to do otherwise is “transphobic”. They have dismissed claims that sex offenders are transitioning to gain access to women inmates.
However, Freedom of Information Act responses show that 48% of all transgender prisoners counted by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) are sex offenders, compared with 19% in the prison population as a whole. Of the 125 trans prisoners in English and Welsh jails, 60 are sex offenders, including 27 rapists and five attempted rapists.
The MoJ refuses to reveal how many trans women sex offenders have been moved to women’s jails, but media reports suggest at least six have.
Crook said she had personally witnessed female prisoners visibly “intimidated” by a male-bodied trans inmate in their midst. “The trans prisoner was dominating the space and the women were round the edges,” she said.
Nicola Williams, of the campaign group Fair Play for Women, said: “Every time we have raised concerns about locking up male-bodied people with vulnerable women, we are told the Prison Service has ‘strict safeguards’ in place. The fact that allegations against this person were known, yet they were still sent to New Hall to carry out further attacks, shows a major failure of those safeguards.”
Currently the only trans inmates who have a right to choose men’s or women’s prisons are those who have legally changed their gender — a lengthy process needing the consent of two doctors. Other trans prisoners, such as White, may be moved at the Prison Service’s discretion.
However, the government is holding consultations on allowing people to “self-identify”, changing their legal gender on demand. Women’s rights campaigners fear this could lead to a “flood” of male-bodied transgender prisoners into female prisons.
The Prison Service says its safeguards would still exclude any trans inmate deemed to be a risk to women, but Williams said the failings in White’s case “make us even more worried about what will happen if self-identification goes through”.
Mark Fairhurst, acting general secretary of the Prison Officers’ Association, said the rapist’s placement among women prisoners was “disgraceful”, adding: “We would demand a full inquiry and we would expect disciplinary action to be taken against decision makers.”
A spokesman for the Prison Service said it “apologised sincerely for the mistakes that were made in this case”, but could not say whether an inquiry would be launched.
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