Prison Rape: A Critical Review of the Literature

摘要

Recent federal legislation has called for research and interventions to address the problem of prison rape. This paper critically reviews the published research on prison sexual victimization and places this research in the broader context of measuring sensitive and stigmatized behaviors. The paper is intended to offer substantive suggestions on the best ways to measure the prevalence and incidence of sexual victimization in prison, to explore problems that will be encountered in assessing and interpreting results of a national survey of prisons and jails, and to summarize the prior and current literature. While there are some similarities in measuring prison rape and sensitive behaviors in the community such as abortion, drug use, and homosexual behavior, the prison context also changes the nature of the measurement problem.