I was on the London Overground last year when a bunch of teenage boys sitting opposite started babbling as we went past Wandsworth prison, saying things like, “This is how we do it in Wandsworth bruv” and “Welcome to Wandsworth”. I knew what they were referring to—I too had seen the sex tape from 2024 that prison officer Linda de Sousa Abreu had made with an inmate. She was subsequently jailed for misconduct in public office. I remember how the moral panic focused not on the power imbalance between them but on the fact that Abreu was married, as if cheating was the worst possible moral offence—and ignoring the fact that the video was likely made for her husband’s satisfaction, as they were both openly swingers. I also remembered the proliferation of OnlyFans videos afterwards that mimicked the event, with two or more porn actors taking on the roles.
No imitations however have reached the virality of the original, which is so compelling largely because it isn’t constructed. In it, one inmate films and commentates while another fucks Abreu, who is still in her uniform. Both of them are eager and frenzied, the latter probably due to the risk and small window of time they have to execute what they want. It’s immediately obvious that neither prisoner has any privacy from the other; in the background you can see their shared toilet bowl.
Many people, understandably, expressed outrage about a prison officer having sex with a man who is in many ways forced to be subservient to her. In New South Wales in Australia, new legislation has recently been brought in to outlaw these relationships. But to me the most obvious atrocity wasn’t her having sex from a position of power with a man who was locked up, but the fact that he was locked up at all.
We already dehumanise and degrade people through imprisoning them, depriving them of their freedom and privacy. How was Abreu having sex with this prisoner somehow worse than that? She had done wrong by him and everyone else there the day she stepped into that job; how can we expect morality from those used to uphold an immoral system? Maybe he even felt more like a human being in that act of sex than he did in his day-to-day life as a prisoner, a class treated as subhuman.
I remember watching a documentary on a North American prison in lockdown, though the name of it now escapes me. One scene stayed with me, in which a female prison officer was walking past doors of barred cells and one of the inmates deliberately aimed at and sprayed his cum across her. It was an act of sexual violence, sure, but all I could think was what would you expect? When you treat people with brutality they respond with it. Although what he did was wrong and abhorrent, he was completely disempowered and it was his one recourse to level out the playing field between them, the only response and insult he had left at his disposal. I read Kathryn Scanlan’s Kick the Latch this week, a book compiled from conversations with a woman, Sonia, who worked at racetracks and in prisons across the US in the second half of the 20th century. She wrote that you “can’t blame them. Sexual misconduct, flashing their dicks. You write them up, you ignore it”. “You can’t blame them” echoed my sentiment—how can you hold someone to moral behaviour in a situation where the state has demoralised them to such an extent?
I can’t help thinking that sometimes we are distracted by smaller infractions when the more egregious issue is right there. Is it right to have prisons, these places of violence and punishment disguised as protection?
