Movement for Justice protest against the incarceration of women at Yarl's Wood detention centre. Credit: Demotix/Guy Corbishley.
The UK police, courts, the prison system and the entire judicial apparatus transparently and resolutely fail to tackle rape culture. Prisons cannot solve sexual violence while also protecting it.
To call endemic sexual violence 'rape culture' is not just a statement of prevalence, though there are estimated to be up to 95,000 rapes annually. Instead, 'rape culture' is an analysis of how rape, sexual assault and harassment are procedural, and of how the state mechanisms that are supposed to prevent it instead reproduce and reinforce it.
