New guidelines proposed to deal with sex assault victims

Health-care professionals often seem to believe that a well-built woman cannot be raped. Or that if there is no physical injury on the victim, she could not have been raped.

It is with the aim to tackling such biases that KEM Hospital, along with the Centre for Enquiry into Health and Allied Themes (Cehat), a research centre for health and related services, is deliberating on the crucial role doctors, medical students and health-care professionals can play in better handling sexual assault and rape victims.

At a conference organised on Sunday, speakers sought to sensitise these professionals to the needs of sexual assault victims by proposing a new set of guidelines for collecting evidence from sexual assault and rape victims.

While terming the evidence collection procedures currently in practice as “outdated” and “regressive”, Dr Jagdeesh N, a forensic scientist and consultant with Cehat said, “While the patient must be made aware of his/her right to not give away certain information, the doctors should explain why a particular piece of information or evidence is necessary instead of just demanding it.”

Stating that the standard query on ‘the last date of consensual sex’ might not have any bearing on the case, “as the question is only relevant if the rape has occured within the week prior to the rape, doctors should accordingly modify it,” said Jagdeesh, adding that, “This is something we have remedied in the form.”

Jagdeesh also advocated a step-down in the emphasis health-care professionals paid on the hymen, and if it’s torn or not.

The new guidelines, he said, wished to do away with the archaic and intrusive practice of the two-finger test, where the doctor inserts two fingers into a woman’s vagina to check size.

However, there is much resistance to the new guidelines at a government level too.