The medical world caught up by #MeToo

#MeToo among doctors

Wednesday, January 11 at 8:30 p.m. on LCP

The case caused a stir in the medical community. In February 2014, Dr. André Hazout, a renowned gynecologist, was sentenced to eight years in prison for rape and sexual assault. His victims? Patients, abused by a caregiver in whom they had placed all their trust. For Dr. Emmanuelle Piet, president of the Feminist Collective Against Rape, this scandal is to medicine what the DSK affair was to politics: the trigger for awareness. “This trial showed that doctors could be rapists and that they could be convicted,” observes the activist.

However, has the time of #MeToo struck in the world of health? According to this documentary by Xavier Deleu and Julie Pichot, sexual violence is still largely taboo there. And “rapists in white coats” would often be protected by an Order of Physicians that many consider “wait-and-see”.

Over the past ten years, the two directors have met dozens of alleged or proven victims of caregivers. So Jackie, who says she was abused by her psychiatrist, she who had already suffered sexual violence in her childhood. Or Anne, who also claims to have been assaulted by her psychiatrist when she was a minor and was trying to recover from her brother’s suicide.

For these women, the page is all the more difficult to turn since the doctors concerned have kept the right to practice, most having only received a reprimand or a provisional suspension. On the side of the College of Physicians, questioned several times in the documentary, we assure you to take any complaint with the utmost seriousness. But in the image, what is most apparent is the malaise of the institution, clearly torn between the desire to protect its peers, and the need to respond to the need for justice for victims.

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