Sydney - It's not true that men who go to jail end up getting raped by sex-starved fellow inmates, research in Australia shows.

"We've shown that the whole belief that young and attractive people are likely to be raped in jail is a bit of a myth," Juliet Richters of Sydney's University of New South Wales said. "It's pretty safe these days, especially with the modern prisons with things like showers in cells."

Just 6 per cent of the male prisoners interviewed said they had had sexual contact, with 5 per cent of them saying sex was consensual.

"We found most men strongly disapproved of sex in prison and considered those who did it to be gay," she said. "There's not a lot of sex because they're so concerned to protect their reputation as a heterosexual that they're really careful to avoid anything like that."

The contrast with the goings-on in women's prisons was stark. More than 36 per cent of female prisoners said they were sexually active - an unsurprising proportion given that a third of women in jail identified as being lesbian or bisexual.

Richters found that jails were rough places, with a third of men and 27 per cent of women reporting physical assaults. She said the violence was "probably a similar reflection of their life before jail." (dpa)