When you are facing a prison or jail sentence, your mind will be bursting with worries about your future. You will also be worrying about how your incarceration will affect your family. If you are facing a prison sentence for the first time, you will be anxious about the whole experience. You will be wondering what prison is really like when you are forced to live behind bars. One anxiety that troubles most first time inmates is the fear of being sexually assaulted. Statistics show that jail rape is a widespread problem.

Unfortunately, sexual assault of prisoners occurs more often than you might think.

The human rights group JDI describes the problem of jail rape as “a human rights crisis of appalling magnitude.” The human rights watch says 140,000 inmates are raped each year in jail.

Bureau of Justice Statistics show that as many as 20% of male prisoners and 25% of female prisoners have been victims of sexual assault in jail or prison.

There are more men raped in prisons than there are women who have been raped while not in jail.

Sexual assaults often go unreported. This is true of assaults committed outside prison as well as inside. Therefore, the actual number of prison rapes is probably even higher in reality. The number of victims of sexual assaults occurring in prison is in the hundreds of thousands even by conservative estimates.

The pattern of sexual assaults is different for men and women. Male prisoners are most likely to be assaulted by other inmates. When the victims are female prisoners the culprits are most often guards or other prison staff.

If you become a target for prison rapists, you can’t protect yourself the way you would on the outside. You can’t run away from threats inside prison. You have to learn how to protect yourself. If you are raped while in jail, you are 10 times more likely to contract a potentially fatal disease as a result of the assault. You need to learn how to avoid becoming a victim of prison violence and the associated dangers.

Protecting yourself against rape and other violent assaults in prison is possible. You don’t need to be physically strong, or to be a master in a martial arts discipline. Your strongest protection will come through knowledge.

To keep yourself safe from rape or assault in jail, you need to learn certain key things. Knowing what to expect and preparing yourself for the prison experience can mean the difference between life and death. Some of the most important things you need to learn are:

1. How to project the right image. This means learning how to present yourself the right way through your body language and the way you speak.

2. How to show you are not a natural victim. You need to learn how to appear strong without seeming threatening. Appearing vulnerable will mark you out as victim material. You can protect yourself by projecting an air of confidence.

3. How to interact with your cellmate and other inmates. Making friends with the wrong group of people can make you into a target automatically.

4. How to have the right sort of relationship with guards and other prison staff. It is vital that you understand how to get along with the guards in a way that won’t antagonise other inmates.

Being locked up in prison will be one of the most traumatic things you ever experience, but it need not be one of the most dangerous. Your time in jail need not be a time of extreme physical danger if you get the right help and advice before you are put behind bars.

Click the following link to learn how to protect yourself against jail rape