Certainly, you have to create an environment within the prison setting where it's not so hard to disclose what happens. Right now, there are so many risks and disincentives that the disclosure just doesn't happen, so it's very grossly under-reported.
We know that in society at large it's an issue. We know that the research suggests that only about 5% of sexual assaults in the community are reported. The great majority just do not get reported.
You have to create an environment where disclosure is more likely to happen. How do you do that? You have to bring education forward for both staff and inmates. You have to do the training. You need to have a strategy to protect those who are more vulnerable and at risk of being victimized. You need to also have a strategy for the predators, to make sure that they don't just get shuffled around.
All that has to come, and you have to track incidents. You have to conduct those regular inmate surveys to ask them if they've been the target of sexual violence and coercion in the last six months, in the last year or ever.
Also, we have to remember that sexual coercion and violence are not just sexual assault. We're talking about sexual harassment, threats and sexual exploitation. All of these things fall under that caption. What we've seen is that the service has simply not done its homework in order to know what the prevalence is, and they can't respond to it because they don't know.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act is not the panacea. I'm sure that a Canadian version of it could be drafted to inspire best practices from their experience. They now have a commission based on that statute. They have a resource centre. They've drafted guidelines and best practices. All of this could be inspiring the drafters at the Department of Justice to do a bang-up job to have something that could effect change in the correctional system, and I think not doing it is problematic.