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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

17yo sectioned in all male adult unit

53 replies

scotsheather · 23/08/2019 19:04

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-49447655

This was on the news. Just makes me so angry. A vulnerable young woman in a confined space with men.

"She said the men looked at her daughter in sexually inappropriate ways and followed her around the unit."

As if being moved to an adult unit at 17 isn't bad enough. What does it take to get vulnerable women the option of male free spaces when at their darkest place?

OP posts:
stealthsquirrelnutkin · 01/09/2019 20:58

But I feel the most important thing is ward culture. On a ward with a good culture, the occasional person who can't help themselves when it comes to bad practice is dealt with.

I eked out my student loan by working as a cleaner in a small (4 ward) geriatric hospital and was very struck by how much ward culture permeated into every aspect of life and work on the wards. Three of the wards were lovely, homelike places, where patients were treated with enormous kindness and good humour. The fourth was identical in every way, same lay out, same staffing levels, same ratio of bedridden to ambulatory patients, same food, same cleaning staff, yet it was a miserable place.

Confused old people lay in their beds moaning and begging for help, it was like something out of Dante's inferno. At first I kept trying to winkle a member of staff out of the fug of smoke in their breakroom to come and find out what was wrong, but they said that the patient just enjoyed making those noises, it wasn't worth bothering with them because nothing was ever good enough, that the situation was being monitored and that input from the cleaning staff on the subject of patient care was not required.

Now that I am 40 years older and have a load more experience I strongly suspect that those poor old people were in constant pain due to bed sores, because they were being turned less often than the bed ridden patients in the other three wards, and probably also that incipient sores weren't being caught and prevented from getting worse. At the time I was too inexperienced and ignorant to have a clue what to do with my concerns, so I'd get through my work as quickly as possible so that I could escape to the next ward.

I think that hospital should have been secretly filmed for a documentary to find out what was causing that one ward to be so horrible when the other three were lovely, and the footage used as a teaching example when training ward managers and health care staff.

worriedaboutray · 02/09/2019 12:26

Was on a mixed sex adult psych inpatient ward circa 2010. A slightly older male patient coerced me into a sexual relationship on the ward. Staff did nothing. At one point we were alone in one of the lounge areas, kissing. I was OK withthat, but probably couldn't give valid consent to it, as I wasn't even able to consent to leave the ward. Then he had sex with me, despite my protestations.

I didn't realise how fucked up it was until I was discharged and better.

stealthsquirrelnutkin · 02/09/2019 14:13

Sorry you got fucked over by an NHS that really doesn't prioritise the mental health and physical autonomy of women and girls worriedabout.

It's so obvious that all places were women and girls are vulnerable should be staffed and run by females only. This refusal to acknowledge the universal truth of male sexual opportunism is why women and girls are being abused in hospitals, prisons, schools and refugee camps.

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