The analysis focuses on physicians’ experiences of sexual harassment by patients or colleagues.
A report on sexual harassment in health shows that six out of ten doctors who reported it they assure that his superior did not investigate the facts. This is demonstrated by a study carried out by Medscape and in which more than 3,000 physicians of both sexes participated.
The analysis focuses on whether these health professionals had seen or experienced sexual harassment by patients or co-workers during the previous four years, both in the office and away from it. The physicians surveyed state that the majority he did not trust that his superior would act about their harassment complaint or investigate it without suggesting that they had overreacted.
“it’s really sadGiven the attention that has been paid to this issue and the number of lawsuits that have been filedthat we still have most of the cases without follow-up,” explains Johns Hopkins Medicine psychiatrist Kali Cyrus. The specialist believes that many department heads, directors of academic medical centers and other people in authority they want “clear evidence” of harassment and a history of misconduct by the defendant before acting and points out that it is not easy to provide this clear evidence when “many of these behaviors can fall into an ambiguous zoneeven if they are repeated.
Doctors claim to experience more sexual harassment
Paradoxically, the report reveals that doctors allege they had been victims of sexual harassment by patients more often than their female partners. Female physicians were more likely to say that they had not found any acts of harassment by a user in the last four years.
“During the last years there has been a lot of publicity about the harassment of doctors by male patients and the fear of being reported,” Cyrus argues. As for the reason female patients take longer to comment on anatomy or body parts, “perhaps women assume that men will agree to this “adds the specialist, who adds that she believes” that there are many stereotypes around sexual aggression and how can we expect that of men, in their frankness both receiving and making comments”.
another specialist, Reshma Jagsiwho was director of the Center for Bioethics and Social Sciences in Medicine at the University of Michigan, notes that “there have been efforts by medical institutions to make expectations of civil conduct explicit.” However, he notes that “although I hope things have improved, I believe that these behaviors continue to occur at a surprisingly high rate“.
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