CAT/OP/27/1 D. Work, educational and recreational activities 38. In some of the facilities that it has visited, the Subcommittee has found that there were few or no work opportunities for women inmates. 39. This situation sometimes arises when women are held in mixed prisons which were not originally designed to house them but which have been converted for that purpose owing to a shortage of the necessary infrastructure. In order to pre vent contact between male and female inmates, women held in these improvised facilities are not given access to common areas where work, educational, exercise, sports and recreational activities take place. Since, in many countries, working or attending educational programmes are important factors in determining eligibility for sentence reduction and parole, women are even more adversely affected by this lack of access. 40. One clear example of gender discrimination encountered by the Subcommittee involved young offenders. In that case, male teenage inmates were receiving schooling with the support of a United Nations body, while their female counterparts had no access to the educational programme in question. 41. The Subcommittee has also encountered cases of labour exploitation and forced labour among women deprived of their liberty, where the women were required to undertake 12 hours of exhausting work every day — carrying heavy loads without any protective clothing — followed by a further two hours of work cleaning the prison facilities. Remuneration for this work was, at best, minimal. If the women complained about the situation or refused to work, they were forced to perform degrading tasks as a punishment, such as cleaning toilets that were in an appalling state without gloves or any other form of protection. 42. In other cases, the Subcommittee has found that the work available to women deprived of their liberty reinforces gender stereotypes associated with traditional roles in the family and society (weaving, macramé, handicrafts, hairdressing, washing and ironing), whereas men have more access than women to opportunities to obtain a higher education and to participate in sports and recreational activities. E. Separation of men and women 43. In several places of deprivation of liberty, the Subcommittee noted that the rule that men and women have to be separated was not observed. It was even more common to find male staff carrying out security duties because of a lack of female guards. In some cases, however, the observance of this rule can give rise to other problems, such as in the case of mixed establishments, where it may lead to situations of de facto isolation if only one or a few women are being held there. 44. The Subcommittee has on occasion noted that adult women are not separated from teenage girls. In some cases, minors had become virtual slaves to adult female inmates in order to supplement their daily food ration. F. Multiple discrimination 45. The Subcommittee has observed that a co mbination of various factors can increase the likelihood of ill-treatment and torture. This may occur, for example, when gender is combined with sexual orientation, age, the type of offence committed, exceptional detention regimes (such as arraigo, or pre-charge detention, for example), ethnicity, migration status and mental illness. GE.16-00603 7/9