A/HRC/31/57/Add.4 that the national health policies relating to lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex persons, including access to hormone treatment, also apply in prisons. Partners and family members of inmates 37. The Special Rapporteur notes with great concern that partners and family members, including children, adolescents, women and the elderly, in order to gain access to penitentiaries, prisons and socioeducational centres to visit inmates, are often subjected to violent, humiliating and oppressive body searches and other forms of sexual violence. This entails stripping women and forcing them to squat over a mirror, contract their muscles and open their anus and vagina with the fingers to allow prison personnel to inspect them. This treatment mostly affects the female relatives (including infants) of inmates, but is also applied to male visitors and inmates, including adolescents in socioeducational centres. 38. Invasive body searches can never be justified on the grounds of aiming to prevent the smuggling of illegal objects, a purpose for which there are less intrusive alternatives. Several international and regional bodies have emphatically rejected their use. 39. The federal Senate and the Commission on Human Rights and Minorities of the Chamber of Deputies unanimously approved a bill (7764/14) to ban the practice at the federal level. It is currently pending approval by the Security Commission and the Constitution and Justice Commission of the Chamber of Deputies. Bill 404/2015, banning the practice in establishments for young offenders, is pending in the Chamber of Deputies. 40. The Special Rapporteur stresses the responsibility of the State to protect the physical and psychological integrity of inmates and relatives, and strongly urges the immediate abolition of these methods. 41. The Special Rapporteur has received consistent reports of threats against female partners and family members of inmates by organized criminal groups, who force them, for example, to participate in trafficking. These cases often include rape, forced prostitution and smuggling of drugs at visits. He is alarmed by reports suggesting that such acts are sometimes the result of cooperation between prison staff and drug bosses. Police and prison personnel 42. Furthermore, police and prison personnel suffer as a result of extensive mass incarceration and severely overcrowded facilities. They lack physical space and are affected by poor health and sanitary conditions, as well as by the environment of violence, in which many fear for their life and physical integrity. The guard-to-inmate ratio ought to be 1:5, however, the Special Rapporteur learned of states where prisons were short of 1,000 staff, and of at least one prison where the guard-to-inmate ratio was 2:490. 43. Staff members often have very poor training, generally marked by a militarized approach that ill equips them to deal appropriately with the complexity and tension that constitutes their day-to-day work. Moreover, the combination of lack of training and highly inadequate working conditions only exacerbates the pattern of violence and has a direct and measurable effect, including in terms of military police homicides. 44. Adding to this vicious circle, the Special Rapporteur received reports of cases in which prison guards had been fired for reporting incidents and replaced by security officers with two weeks of training. Case of Pedrinhas 45. The Special Rapporteur visited the Pedrinhas complex in Sao Luis, Maranhao. In 2013, he communicated with the Government as a result of a deadly riot in Pedrinhas. At the time of the visit, the authorities had succeeded in pacifying the prison by separating the 9