imprisonment

The female defendant was charged with trafficking in person for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The defendant used an employment agency in Peru to offer Peruvian women waitress jobs at her residence in Chile. She would assist them in crossing the border and would pay travel costs. Upon arrival, the victims were kept at the defendant’s residence and were forced to provide sexual services to clients arranged by the defendant. The defendant also kept the victims’ passports so that they would be unable to leave until their debts were paid.

S was convicted for repeated violent rape within an arranged marriage over the course of 13 months. The court imposed a sentence of 13 years, six months imprisonment for the rape, with concurrent sentences for the lesser offenses, calculated as a 15 year base due to the violent nature of the acts and the vulnerability of the victim, with a downward adjustment for the respondent’s lack of prior convictions.

The respondent was convicted of sexual violation by unlawful sexual connection (forcible oral sex) and as accessory to rape, and sentenced to four years imprisonment, calculated as 18 months for assisting to carry out the rape, four years for the unlawful sexual connection, plus some downward adjustments. The Solicitor-General argued that the court should have considered the rape as the primary offense and therefore started with a base of 8 years minimum period of imprisonment.

This paper explores some of the ways in which violence against women relates to the imprisonment of women. It focuses on the role of gender-based violence as a pathway to and consequence of women’s incarceration, as these connections have generally received less attention than violence against women as a prison condition. The paper also considers how these pathways and consequences implicate states’ international law responsibility to eliminate violence against women and offer suggestions for how states might more effectively realize that obligation.