Daily Trust
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.
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.
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