Her sense of shock, and the awful aura of menace that closed in on her, still haunt former prisoner Amy Jones.
Jail should have been a place free from the predators who had sexually assaulted and raped her in her childhood, but the terrifying presence looming over her suggested anything but.
‘The look in her eyes was frightening,’ Amy says, her voice quiet but assertive. ‘She leered at me before lunging forward and grabbing my breasts hard. She squeezed them and I cried out in pain. I was terrified she would rape me.’
The prisoner who sexually assaulted Amy — we cannot legally identify her, so we shall call her J — is a transgender woman, with a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC), and therefore referred to by the female pronoun, but still had male genitalia.
Amy was equally well aware that J still had male genitalia because she often intimidated her and fellow female prisoners at HMP Bronzefield in Ashford, Middlesex, by exposing them.
Moreover, J was serving time for a serious sexual assault on a child and was clearly a danger to other inmates. Yet she had secured a coveted job as a cleaner at the prison gym where Amy also worked. And it was while she was in the gym’s lavatory block that J assaulted her in 2017.
‘What were the officers even thinking, letting her clean toilets in which women would be in a state of undress and alone? Why was there a child sex offender with a penis cleaning the toilets of the gym in a women’s prison?”
J had already stridently asserted her ‘right’ to be treated exactly like other women prisoners, although this clearly terrorised them.
Predator: Karen White, a transwoman who sexually assaulted two women inmates while in prison
‘When J went for a shower, the prison put a sign on the door saying that no one else should enter, because they knew it could upset the women if they saw her naked, but J objected to this and said it was an infringement of her human rights,’ says Amy.
‘She said, “I am a woman and I want to shower with other women.” Just before she assaulted me, she was seen with the shower curtain open, her genitals in full view of the other women.’
Amy, 38, mother to a daughter, is an articulate woman; small in stature with thick, auburn hair and milky white skin.
On the day we meet, in a cafe, she has been released from prison, just over halfway through a nine-year sentence which she began in 2016, for drug-related crime. She is smartly dressed in a black shirt and cream trousers; quick-witted, innately intelligent — but also very angry.
The reason? This month Amy learned that she had failed in a judicial review challenge to the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) policy in relation to the allocation of high-risk transwomen prisoners — including sex offenders like J — to female prisons.
Amy has also brought a separate civil action for damages against Sodexo, the company which runs HMP Bronzefield, and the MOJ.
She argued, through her lawyers, that the law currently discriminates against women prisoners and that the Government has failed to take into account the provisions of the Equality Act which allow for certain single-sex exemptions, permitting men and women to use separate facilities in particularly sensitive circumstances.
The case, for which Amy did not give evidence, involved legal arguments only; neither has J faced any police investigation or charges for the alleged assault.
In a judgment handed down by email, Lord Justice Holroyde accepted there were real concerns raised by Amy, and that ‘a substantial proportion of women prisoners have been the victims of sexual assaults and/or domestic violence’.
He accepted that many would ‘suffer fear and acute anxiety if required to share prison accommodation and facilities with transgender women with male genitalia and convictions for sexual and violent offences against women’.
He also allowed that the statistical evidence showed the proportion of trans prisoners previously convicted of sexual offences was ‘substantially higher’ than for non-transgender men and women prisoners.
Between 2016 and 2019, 97 sexual assaults were recorded in women’s prisons, the judgment said.
As of March 2019, there were 34 transgender women without GRCs allocated to a woman’s prison (Pictured: stock image of women's jail)
Of these, it appears that seven were committed by transgender prisoners without a GRC. It is not known whether any were committed by transgender women with a GRC because they are, apparently, disregarded in Government figures.
But the judge said the statistics ‘. . . are so low in number, and so lacking in detail, that they are an unsafe basis for general conclusions’.
As of March 2019, there were 34 transgender women without GRCs allocated to a woman’s prison. The number of transgender prisoners with a certificate — of which J is one — is thought to be in single-figures across the prison population as a whole.
Male-born trans prisoners were first allowed to request a transfer to women’s jails in England and Wales in 2016. Just a year later the risks of the policy were made clear when a convicted rapist was moved to women’s jail HMP New Hall in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, and sexually assaulted two women inmates.
Karen White identified as a woman but was still legally a man and had not undergone surgery.
She was jailed for life in 2018 by a judge who branded her a ‘highly manipulative’ predator.
Despite the history of such assaults, this month the court decided that, ultimately, the rights of transwomen trumped the concerns of natal female prisoners.
For Amy, who was given legal aid to pursue the case — from which she did not benefit financially — the ruling is profoundly unjust.
Contending that the law needs to be changed, she says the equation is a simple one: ‘If a transwoman is in for violence against women, or sex offences against women or children, you should not be in prison with women.’ Transwomen prisoners were already housed at Bronzefield when Amy arrived there, soon after the law was changed to accommodate them in female prisons.
‘I was a bit shocked because I knew they were sex offenders. An officer told me that, off the record,’ she says. ‘The other women in prison who knew were in shock and angry, too.
‘It’s like putting a crack addict in a crack house, or an alcoholic in a pub. Sex offenders should never be in prison with women. Most women in there have gone through child abuse and domestic violence and rape. What if someone is raped?’
She continues: ‘J would wear a long flowery skirt and sit with her legs wide open. A number of the other girls said it was very distressing to see that.’
Prosecutors claimed White (pictured) - who had a history of sex attacks - used a 'transgender persona' to gain access to vulnerable females. White was ordered to serve a life sentence in a male prison for the jail sex attacks
Since her release, Amy has been supporting women victims of domestic abuse on a voluntary basis. Her own story highlights how the sexual violence perpetrated against her shaped her life and led to her spiral into addiction and crime.
Growing up
