Medico-legal documentation of rape or sexual assault: are community-service doctors equipped for the task?

Autor: Lamaine Fouche, Johan Bezuidenhout, Chantelle Liebenberg, Anthonio Oladele Adefuye
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2018
Předmět:
Zdroj: South African Family Practice, Vol 60, Iss 1 (2018)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2078-6190
2078-6204
DOI: 10.4102/safp.v60i1.4680
Popis: 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
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals
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