Medico-legal documentation of rape or sexual assault: are community-service doctors equipped for the task?
Background: Following upon two-year internship, community-service doctors make mistakes when they deal with evidence of medico-legal examinations in various settings. These mistakes result in alleged perpetrators being released by courts. This study investigated undergraduate clinical forensic medic...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
AOSIS
2018-03-01
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| Series: | South African Family Practice |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://safpj.co.za/index.php/safpj/article/view/4680 |
| Summary: | Background: Following upon two-year internship, community-service doctors make mistakes when they deal with evidence of medico-legal examinations in various settings. These mistakes result in alleged perpetrators being released by courts. This study investigated undergraduate clinical forensic medicine training, based on experiences and opinions of community-service doctors. This article focuses on incidents of alleged rape cases only.
Methods: The study was a quantitative retrospective cohort study that made use of a questionnaire with an adapted Likert scale. An electronic survey tool was employed to target 150 community-service doctors throughout South Africa. Percentages are used to display results.
Results: A response rate of 59.3% was achieved. Although 80% of the participants reported that they had undergraduate training on how to manage alleged rape or sexual assault cases, only 11.4% of the participants had hands-on exposure to an alleged rape case during their undergraduate training. In addition, the majority of the participants (77.1%) never had undergraduate training on how to complete the J88 form. These findings indicate that clinical forensic training in the undergraduate medical programme does not adequately prepare community-service doctors to meet the challenges of clinical forensic practice. The current curriculum should be adapted to address these shortcomings.
Conclusions: Perpetrators cannot be convicted if evidence collected cannot stand up in court. Proper training of undergraduate medical students prior to their community-service posting will ensure that medico-legal documentation is completed correctly, leading to the presentation of credible evidence in a court of law in order to ensure successful conviction of alleged perpetrators.
Full text of the research articles are available online at www.medpharm.tandfonline.com/ojfp)
S Afr Fam Pract 2018; DOI: 10.1080/20786190.2017.1348046 |
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| ISSN: | 2078-6190 2078-6204 |