Sexual assault and sexual abuse both fall under the umbrella of sexual violence. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC), along with Federal and state laws and institutional policies, sexual violence includes a variety of acts, one of which is unwanted sexual contact/touching. Of course, the medical community vehemently denies that their actions are sexual because they claim there is no malicious or lustful intent. But as I discussed many times previously, including here and here, what medical professionals are doing to their patients analogous to sexual abuse. They are subjecting their patients to unwanted sexual stimuli without their knowledge or consent. It’s about the patient’s perceptions and responses, not about how medical professionals perceive their actions because it is the patient on the receiving end of the unwanted intimate contact. It’s the patient that will have to live the rest of his or her life with the resulting trauma that is akin to what victims of violent rape endure.
Furthermore, as this article correctly asserts, sexual abuse is not always about sexual gratification but often involves an act of power over another. Specifically, it is a provider’s abuse of a privileged position of power when he or she decides not to inform a patient that intimate tasks will be performed on a patient for a non-intimate procedure. The provider thereby denies the right of the patient to decline the intimate actions. This results in medical harm that is
not only … a physical perpetration but as an act of power of one person over another’
Violence in medicine: necessary and unnecessary, intentional and unintentional. Philos Ethics Humanit Med 13, 7 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13010-018-0059-y
Furthermore, medical harm is
not necessarily the intention, but the byproduct of action.
Ibid
So what if medical professionals don’t intend to cause sexual harm. The fact is that they do. And they should be held accountable for consciously making decisions that result in life-long trauma, the same way we hold impaired drivers accountable for killing and maiming innocent people. They don’t mean to hurt anybody when they get behind the wheel and drive impaired. But they made a decision that resulted in harm. It’s a basic similar concept.
As the NSVRC and multiple other organizations and institutions hold:
Consent must be freely given and informed, and a person can change their mind at any time.
Consent is more than a yes or no. It is a dialogue about desires, needs, and level of comfort with different sexual interactions.
The right for someone to change his or her mind is an important part of consent. Consent can be withdrawn at any time. Because a patient is under anesthesia, this can’t happen at the time when medical professionals interact with the patient’s intimate spaces, which makes it even more important to ensure a patient has truly consented to any type of intimate intervention before he or she is anesthetized.
As I noted before in previous posts, the medical community relies on implied consent as their “get out of jail free card” and their key to do pretty much whatever they want. Implied consent is most certainly not freely given and denies a patient the right to change his or her mind. How can that happen when the patient has no idea he or she has “consented” to an intimate task or procedure to begin with? It can’t. So why is implied consent allowed in medical situations where the provider knows intimate access will occur when it is clearly not allowed outside hospital walls? It shouldn’t be except in the cases of a medical emergency.
Recall that the investigator into Larry Nassar’s case admitted before they knew that his actions were sexually deviant that
whether medically sound or not, the failure to adequately explain procedures such as these invasive, sensitive procedures, is opening the practice up to liability and is exposing patients to unnecessary trauma based on the possibility of perceived inappropriate sexual misconduct. In addition, we find that the failure to obtain consent from patients prior to the procedure is likewise exposing the practice to liability.
I realize that medical professionals don’t like to be compared to rapists. I get it. Perhaps we should redefine sexual violence as inclusive of intimate violations because that’s what it truly is. It’s invading someone’s most intimate spaces, which is what happens in medical settings – unnecessarily so, given that they could obtain consent but choose not to.
I have discussed this topic ad nauseam on my blog and will continue to do so.
Call it what is is: sexual abuse.
#MedicalMeToo 