Female surgeons sexually assaulted by colleagues while operating

[yourhairiswinterfire]

A major analysis of NHS staff has found.

BBC News has spoken to women who were sexually assaulted in the operating theatre while surgery took place.

The study's authors say there is a pattern of female trainees being abused by senior male surgeons, and this is happening now, in NHS hospitals.

The Royal College of Surgeons said the findings were "truly shocking".

Sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape have been referred to as surgery's open secret.
There is an untold story of women being fondled inside their scrubs, of male surgeons wiping their brow on their breasts and men rubbing erections against female staff. Some have been offered career opportunities for sex.
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Nearly two-thirds of women surgeons who responded to the researchers said they had been the target of sexual harassment and a third had been sexually assaulted by colleagues in the past five years.
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Registered surgeons - men and women - were invited to take part completely anonymously and 1,434 responded. Half were women:

• 63% of women had been the target of sexual harassment from colleagues
• 30% of women had been sexually assaulted by a colleague
• 11% of women reported forced physical contact related to career opportunities
• At least 11 incidents of rape were reported
• 90% of women, and 81% of men, had witnessed some form of sexual misconduct

While the report shows men are also subject to some of this behaviour (24% had been sexually harassed), it concludes men and women surgeons are "living different realities".

The pair of reports suggest the relatively lower proportion of women surgeons (around 28%), combined with surgery being deeply hierarchical, gives some men significant power and this combines badly with the high-pressure environment of surgery.

"That leads to people being able to behave with impunity and much of this goes unchecked," Prof Carrie Newlands, consultant surgeon from the University of Surrey.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-66775015

I read that surgeons were more likely to be psychopaths than the rest of the population. Not reassuring at all.

Those articles are absolutely rage inducing, you're right @IcakethereforeIam

The culture that these are the brightest and best, never to be questioned and frankly I'm aghast at the BMA recommendation to check the local policy ... it doesn't actually much matter what the policy is when you're talking about illegal behaviour. I appreciate not everyone would want to involve the police but based on that case study even the police would actually have handled it better. Similarly the push for training, surely most people don't actually need to go on a training course to tell them not to be rapists. Even the proposed solutions just show how bizarre the culture is; poor surgeons, how can they possibly be expected to know not to wave their erections round in theatre if they've never had the training?! We have got ourselves in to such a mess with healthcare that the shitty practitioners, and there will be some, as in all walks of life, can't be disciplined because they are now genuinely irreplaceable and meanwhile we're constantly told they're all heroes for bravely soldiering on in their highly regarded, highly paid, highly pensioned roles. And yes, of course I know this is not all healthcare professionals, or even all male surgeons, but my goodness me I cannot believe this is going on in 2023 in the NHS, it really is a disgrace.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/aug/30/female-surgeons-patient-outcomes-better-studies

And yet women still make better surgeons. Perhaps because they are concentrating on actually y'know operating rather than abusing their female work colleagues?

I listened to some of this on the car radio this morning. It's shocking but I'm also not shocked anymore.

I wonder how many patients have been victims in hospital.

Perhaps the 'sexual assault is bad guys' training should be given by a Police Officer (assuming one can be found that believes that). It'd have to be a bloke, because wimmen eh! Wot do they know? Uniform, no ribbons, no fucking dancing. Make them take it seriously. But given the training to the managers first. As I see it, they're colluding in a cover up, by act or, crucially, by omission they're just as bad.

Doesn't surprise me in the least. It seems all the large public institutions have an issue, Police, Fire, Health. And then there's local and national Government. We already know there are issues there. I do wonder about the Civil Service. Haven't checked, but someone must have looked into it.

They all hide behind their committees, taskforces, and focus groups etc pretending to be something they are not.

I think it’s everywhere @unsync you only have to read MN to realise just how rare it is to not have been letched over by opportunistic men.

I have to agree that I am getting a bit tired of the trans issue being pushed into every other conversation.

Whilst I think it's fair point around the dodgy D&I initiatives at the NHS the sexual harassment and discrimination against female doctors has been going on for long before the trans stuff blew up and will undoubtedly continue long after. Its root cause is nothing to do with trans issues and is everything to do with male entitlement. It would be nice if we could have a conversation where that was the focus. There are plenty of other relevant threads to discuss trans issues on.

I'm sure I'll get a massive pile on for saying this but I do feel that if I'm getting tired of it people who are less interested in the debate must be throughly fed up.

For what it's worth I say this as someone who was at the original meeting at Hyde Park Corner/ Uni women's club. Was at the Man Friday ponds protest and went flyering with FPFW so I do think I have reasonable GC credentials.

I have lived long enough and have had enough experience of men, including sexual assault, that I now assume all men are guilty until proved innocent. Which of course they can't do. There is a registered sex offender in our wider family.

But even so I was shocked when I read the news this morning. Bloody men.

Sexual misconduct training?

Do they also need breathing-in-and-out training? Walking upright? Only using scalpels during authorised operations in theatre and not to stab random members of the public in the street?

Female surgeon - I’m shocked by the reported extent of severe incidents . Things are changing though , it was very different 10, 20 years ago. I wonder if these stats relate to life time prevalence ?

10 years ago a male consultant routinely adjusted his glasses on the shoulder of any female trainee or scrub nurse standing next to him. They were also terrible lewd puns and comments.
He stopped this behaviour some years ago ? 8-10 after the deanery spoke to us all at a feedback day and we called out his behaviour. This kind of thing is not accepted now in my opinion.

It was never acceptable

Yes, this.

Men who are incredibly highly trained and skilled at complex medicine and surgery surely don't need to be trained on not breaking basic laws like sexual assault and rape?

I very much doubt the lack of training is the issue. The lack of consequences for their behaviour is the issue, and is within the gift of NHS management to solve.

I'm sure I'll get a massive pile on for saying this but I do feel that if I'm getting tired of it people who are less interested in the debate must be throughly fed up.

It's all part of the same issue, and @RoaringtoLangClegintheDark didn't actually mention the trans issue, someone accused her of "dogwhistling".

And this is the Sex and Gender board, where GC perspectives are supposed to be siloed off to.

Absolutely horrendous contempt from these abusers for women colleagues and it makes me extrapolate, likely to women patients too. Awful.

It's all part of the same big picture though so I understand what the poster upthread meant. The root cause of the trans issues that women take exception to is also male entitlement.

Currently that entitlement is running rampant across all aspects of society as is the disdain for women that runs alongside it. None of these things are existing in a vacuum.

We could also cite the prolific rise in violent, mass access pornography and the normalisation of 'sex work' as a factor too as part of the bigger picture. Those two things also intersect with gender ideology as well as the issues reported in this analysis.

So yes in theory we can take a very narrow look at only these reported incidents of abuse and harassment but feminism has always extrapolated discussion out to culture, politics and the overall climate for women in any given time period.

Of course it is all connected and the common factor is men, whatever jobs they have or whatever they choose to wear. How to spot the good ones is getting trickier as these abuses come to light.

YouTube flagged this for me. It's the woman who was sexually assaulted as detailed in the article I posted yesterday at 19.08. She's telling her story to Shelagh Fogarty on LBC. In the unlikely event she reads this, I am so angry for you. There's no justice in the NHS, I'm glad you won your tribunal. There should have been consequences for the people who should have been there for you but who chose to let you down, to take the side of wrongness and to compound your ordeal.

It IS all part of the same issue - the fact that a sizeable and influential minority (i hope) of men see women as resources for them to use and not fully human in our own right.

The fact that if one man wants something, it seemingly doesn't matter if that harms 100s of women and children, there are men and women lining up to facilitate it.

Surrogacy, 'sex work', single sex hospital wards and other spaces, sexual harassment, it's all the same issue at heart.

Women's rights - our human rights - have not been around for long in this country and are already disappearing. Although obviously there are plenty of parts of the world with countries which are far further along the sliding scale of treating women as subhuman, make no mistake that we're sliding in that direction in this country too.

This is unbelievably shocking. And people wonder why the NHS is falling apart. This woman was forced to leave medicine by misogyny and a total failure of the staff paid to deal with this sort of complaint. She could be operating on presumably a long line of people who need it today if there wasn't such blatant misogyny.

They didn't want to 'ruin his career' - so they ruined hers, the victim.

He was subsequently arrested for assaulting a CHILD so the NHS enabled him and he went on to do that. Escalation, it's classic. The NHS helped ensure that happened. That poor child.

Sadly this isn’t anything new, as student nurse in the 70’s it happened to me and my colleagues when doing the theatres placement. If you dared to say anything you were effectively blacklisted and failed that placement. No one would believe you, there wasn’t any system for raising concerns.
You learned which consultants and senior registrars to try to avoid but because theatres are confined and you had to stand stock still so as to avoid distracting the surgeon, you were effectively helpless.

Are nurses subject to sexual assault? It would be interesting to extend this survey to cover other groups in the NHS.

Charter in response to the 2021 survey that reported 60% nurses have been sexually harassed/assaulted.
https://www.unison.org.uk/news/2021/06/majority-of-nursing-staff-have-experienced-sexual-harassment-at-work-survey-shows/

https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/sexual-safety-in-healthcare-organisational-charter/

Nurses are deterred from making complaints about sexual misconduct from patients.

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

Another new article in the Guardian, a different first hand account, another career blighted

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/13/sexual-abuse-female-surgeons-quit-misogyny-women-healthcare

There's a website!

https://www.survivinginscrubs.co.uk/

This man has written a book as well!