reported thousands were arrested and tortured in prisons around the country, with former inmates alleging mass rape of men, women and children by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, in prisons such as Kahrizak and Evin. Following the 2009 presidential election, Iranian presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi said several protesters held behind bars in Evin Prison had been savagely raped, according to a confidential letter to former president and cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Karroubi said this was a "fragment" of the evidence he had and that if the denials did not stop, he would release even more. On 9 August 2009, in a letter to the Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council of Iran, Mehdi Karroubi demanded investigation of Iranian prisons for possible torture and, in particular, sexual harassment of men and women. On 19 August, he wrote to parliament speaker Ali Larijani, asking to meet with him, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, judiciary chief Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the state prosecutor to "personally present my documents and evidence over the cases of sexual abuse in some prisons specially Kahrizak." Ali Larijani and Sadeq Larijani (Judiciary committee) both officially rejected his claims and Ali Khamenei's representatives, and Vice Chairman of National Security Commission of the parliament demanded Karroubi's arrest. Turkey Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have both released reports of widespread rape and abuse of prisoners in Turkey spanning multiple decades. Kurdish prisoners have also been specifically targeted for rape and other forms of sexual violence. Middle East Rape is regularly used in prisons across the wider Middle East. Sexual abuse of detained women, children and men is rampant in UAE, Saudi and Bahraini prisons. United States In the United States, the overwhelming majority of prison rape cases involve men who are raped by other men. This is due in part to the fact that in the United States the vast majority of incarcerated people are men. Sexual contact with inmates by prison staff is illegal, regardless of supposed consent. Public awareness of common prison rape is a relatively recent development, and estimates of its prevalence have varied widely over the past several decades. In 1974, Carl Weiss and David James Friar wrote that 46 million Americans would one day be incarcerated; of that number, they held that 10 million would be raped. According to a US Department of Justice report from 2013, an estimated 5.0% of people incarcerated