The director of the OVP, Humberto Prado, said that the impact of violence against women in prisons is also experienced by their families.
The Venezuelan Prisons Observatory (OVP) expressed its concern about the situation experienced by women who are deprived of liberty in the country’s prisons and police cells, warning that they are made invisible and subjected to different types of violence by the State.
For the OVP, women who are under this condition face a situation of extreme vulnerability where they have been forced to have sexual relations with prison guards or members of the National Guard to obtain benefits and improve their conditions during his time in prison; which is a serious violation of human rights.
Along with this, they are in inadequate confinement conditions; They are humiliated, they do not eat well and they do not have enough water to clean themselves. They also warn that they do not have access to sanitary pads or tampons for when their menstruation comes and to maintain their hygiene, which aggravates their condition of exclusion and abuse.
In Venezuela there is only one prison for women, the National Institute of Women’s Orientation (INOF). The rest are improvised female annexes, which do not even meet the minimum standards of confinement and do not meet the particular needs of women.
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Currently, 28% of the women deprived of liberty in Venezuela are in the INOF, with a total of 650 women and critical overcrowding of 185.71%.
The director of the OVP, Humberto Prado, said that the impact of this violence against women is also experienced by family members, who are forced to go through verbal abuse, searches with touching against their will, among other things.
Of these facilities, said the OVP, there are at least 16 throughout the country that are not suitable to house them because they are “improvised infrastructures that are attached to the male prisons” and that are devoid of the conditions and parameters to comply with the gender perspective.
The problem is aggravated because the searches are carried out by male personnel from the Immediate Response Group of the Penitentiary Service, who do not respect the privacy of the detained women, mistreat them and destroy their belongings.
More recently, in the context of women arbitrarily detained during post-election repression, women held at the La Crisálida Training Center for Female Prosecuted Women, also located in the state of Miranda, face particularly critical conditions. There, there have been reports of sexual abuse committed by guards or members of the National Guard, in addition to obvious negligence in caring for their basic needs.
OVP denounces opacity in prison cases
The OVP also denounced that there is opacity on the part of State agencies regarding the decisions taken improvisedly and without prior notice by the authorities, after relatives of the post-election detainees denounced the suspension of visits at the Capital Judicial Confinement Center. «Rodeo I».
According to the newspaper The Impulserelatives fear that massive transfers are taking place without prior notice due to the presence of a strong security device, including military vehicles and a helicopter in the area.
It is important to remember that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has issued provisional measures to protect the life and integrity of the inmates of Rodeo I, due to the serious conditions of overcrowding and violence that have been recorded in this prison. Despite this, the Venezuelan State has repeatedly failed to comply with these measures, demonstrating a clear lack of will to guarantee the rights of political prisoners.
With additional information from Press Release
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