Report: When Doctors Sexually Abuse Patients, They Usually Get Away With It

This is a serious problem in every state across the country.

21 March, 2018
What Happens When Doctors Sexually Assault Their Patients?

The Atlanta-Journal Constitution has published a damning, terrifying report alleging a widespread systematic failure to address patient sexual abuse in the medical community, likening the seriousness of the scandal to the Catholic Church's sexual abuse crisis in the late 1980s.

The year-long investigation analyzed more than 100,000 disciplinary documents and other records from across the country and "identified more than 3,100 doctors who were publicly disciplined since Jan. 1, 1999 after being accused of sexual infractions​." Although "the vast majority of the nation's 900,000 doctors do not sexually abuse patients,​" the report concluded, "it happens far more often than anyone has acknowledged.​"

What's more: Those who commit crimes are rarely punished, likely because of their stature and the specialized knowledge they bring to the community. "Hospitals and health care organizations brush off accusations or quietly push doctors out, the investigation found, without reporting them to police or licensing agencies," AJC reported. "Nationwide, the AJC found that of the 2,400 doctors publicly disciplined for sexual misconduct, half still have active medical licenses today.​"​

The offenses, which include sexual assault, harassment, and child pornography, are even enabled by a lax legal system, the report found. In Georgia, for example, "two-thirds of the doctors disciplined in the state for sexual misconduct were permitted to practice again." Across the nation, only 11 states require medical officials to report suspicious of sexual crimes against adults to police or prosecutors. Sexual abuse committed by physicians is so rarely punished that the AJC says it is "exposing a phenomenon of physician sexual misconduct that is tolerated — to one degree or another — in every state in the nation" and that a few of the doctors "are among the nation's worst sex offenders."

Doctors are highly venerated, often in positions of uncontested authority, and many work in communities that are in high need of their medical expertise. ​When they abuse their authority, victims are shell-shocked. "We are so reliant on them, we are so helpless and vulnerable and literally in pain often times when we go in there. We just have to trust them,"​ said David Clohessy, who heads SNAP, a support and advocacy organization for people sexually abused by officials like priests and doctors. "We just do not want to believe, first of all, that a doctor is capable of this , and secondly that their colleagues and supervisors will not address this immediately and effectively when we report it."

Read the full report here.

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Credit: Cosmopolitan
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