Health care and sexual harassment

There are people that life forces us to trust our lives into their care. I want to talk about those that we come into contact with by circumstance and frailty of humanity. Others are majorly a matter of our choices. I want to talk about health care givers and the experiences of people when they seek for healing. Health care is a blanket term for a profession that includes doctors, nurses and other technicians or specialists.

For the fact that it is a job that deals with the vulnerabilities, weakness and frailties of human, it is a profession that encounters human in their most basic, natural and weakest period. It is a profession that brings mankind face to face with the mortality of another of its kind. It is a profession that exposes the best kept secret that man keeps under the facade that he allows the society to see. Doctors and nurses and other health care givers know our best kept secrets even through our generation before we were born. In recent times, medicine have become very sophisticated and dynamic, so histories of illness and diseases can easily be deduced through sophisticated research.

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Therefore bearers of this peculiar professional mantle must have a great deal of empathy and sympathy for the people they care for from time to time. As it is in other professions, there are the good eggs and there are the bad ones. Sometimes the pressure becomes overbearing in such profession and makes those who practice it act under such. Health care is messy and traumatic but it is a job that involves a lot of dedication.

Now in healthcare like in other profession, people are coming out to share their experiences of certain unprofessionalism and sexual harassment that patients face on occasions. People have shared their experiences and I will reproduce a little while keeping their identities secret.

A man shared a story of his experience when getting medically examined. It was supposed to be a routine prostate exam, but he became uncomfortable when the doctor, a male, began to touch his genitals longer than it was necessary. In a crisp voice iced with undisguised anger he asked coolly of the doctor. “Is this examination over?” The doctor seeming to come round hastily stopped touching him and tried to give the prognosis in what had become an embarrassing situation. “I was so embarrassed even as he was and that made me wonder about the true sexuality of that doctor. I stopped using his hospital immediately,” He said.

A woman’s story as a patient in the second trimester of her pregnancy during her routine checkup was about the conduct of her male handler when carrying out her routine checkup. She was uncomfortable that a male doctor should examine, preferring a female doctor but he was the doctor currently assigned to her case.

She said: “I felt he took long examining me. It felt very embarrassing. By the time I got off the examination table, I was very embarrassed and angry to see him fully aroused. I left the hospital and when I got home, I told my husband that I will insist on a female handler or I leave the hospital.”

The third woman’s story was that she was in the hospital to complain about a persistent chest ache. “After asking me questions, the doctor told me to lie down to feel my chest and the location of the pain. Then he began to touch me inappropriately. I got up immediately and drew my clothes together and stormed out of the hospital,” she said.

In case you are thinking it is gender specific.  A man also shared his story about how he was hospitalised and how a female caregiver would try to fondle his privates anytime she came to check on him and how he insisted that he wanted her changed or he be discharged immediately. “I was a young man and not a stranger to sex but I felt violated. I mean I was ill and very vulnerable. I felt she took advantage of me. But how do you fight that? If it’s the other way, the female patient would have shouted rape!,” He countered.

A friend actually shared how she ran away from a female caregiver because the woman was actually hitting on her. “I went to her for therapy. After two sessions, she kept commenting on how I had a very lovely body. The way she looked at me gave me the creeps. I did not return there and ignored her calls,” he said.

Can such sexual harassments or violations be prosecuted? Quite frankly, it will be difficult to but if patients take note of those kinds of caregivers or their organisations, their management could be informed. Or the general organisation petitioned. Alternatively, there could be investigations conducted on such hospitals where people can be made to act like patients to get to the root of the matter and those caught in the act prosecuted.

Sexual harassment cuts across different professions but it is a bigger cause of concern when a person is sexually harassed by those who should offer empathy and healing.