File on Four - sympathetic programme about sexual assaults in hospitals

[Forwarder]

Radio 4 has just broadcast programme based on research by Women's Rights Network

Case studies and data about sexual assaults by staff and patients on staff and patients in hospital settings. IE by men on women.

It even mentioned the need for single sex wards and tightening up the Equality Act. Good piece.

Thank you OP. Will give this a listen

A link to the episode, for posterity:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lyxt

Wow. That's brilliant work from WRN.

It was a horrifying report and very well presented. I was surprised that no mention was made of the case where a woman was raped by a male on a so called singles sex ward and the hospital denied there was a male there, for a whole year. There was some defensiveness by the woman who said that this wasn’t the main concern.

Thanks for this.

I saw this scandal reported earlier on the BBC and Guardian websites and searched seemingly in vain for ANY mention of the predominant sex of the assailants, and the predominant sex of the victims.

So thank you for this link.

To be fair, though I am appalled by Annex B and feel it is entirely wrong to undermine single-sex policies in the way it does, it is likely that there is a much more significant detriment to women in the NHS from patients sexually assaulting nurses, and from male staff sexually assaulting women, whether staff or patients.

That doesn’t mean Annex B should be ignored. Its removal and replacement with a policy that considers women’s rights to dignity and privacy as a priority is important. But in terms of sexual assault in hospitals, it may well not be the primary focus as, though serious for the poor woman who was raped, it’s probably still a very rare event in comparison to the appallingly normalised sexual assaults that are occurring multiple times every single day.

PriOn1 yes i totally agree with what you say, but they were talking about sex specific wards, so it seemed appropriate. Of course it is men who do these things regularly and persistently to women. Given the general rate overall I would imagine that there are many more cases never reported. As I said horrifying.

It even mentioned the need for single sex wards and tightening up the Equality Act. Good piece.

It was, but I felt concerned to learn that, on this point, Rishi Sunak’s reply was that the Equality Act might be reformed which I thought was an unfortunate term to use. It is not a case of reforming it, but of clarifying definitions in light of modern misunderstandings of language.

There seem to be two different news stories. One is the widely reported story about WRN's use of FOI to discover that there had been 6,500 rapes and sexual assaults in hospitals over the past four years:

https://www.womensrights.network/hospital-report

To be fair, the Byline Times got this story before WRN, but WRN managed to get a lot more publicity for it.

The other is the Guardian's story, also based on FOI requests, of staff being assaulted by patients:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/23/nhs-staff-report-20000-claims-of-patient-sexual-misconduct-over-five-years

Both are shocking.

Thanks, @RoyalCorgi

The defensive speaker is a Libdem MP. Her boss says women 'clearly' have penises. 🤣😪🙄🤦‍♀️

I thought the programme did well to lay out the scale of issue and why women need:
Single sex wards
To be able to discriminate on sex of health care assistants, nurses, radiographers, doctors etc.
Female staff also need protection and acknowledgement

But women aren't being erased

Here are the Surviving in Scrubs case studies. There might be a man's story in there but at first glance, all women.

https://survivinginscrubsorg.wordpress.com/your-stories/