Medico-legal documentation of rape or sexual assault: are community-service doctors equipped for the task?
South African Family Practice
| Field | Value | |
| Title | Medico-legal documentation of rape or sexual assault: are community-service doctors equipped for the task? | |
| Creator | Fouche, Lamaine Bezuidenhout, Johan Liebenberg, Chantelle Adefuye, Anthonio Oladele | |
| Description |
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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| Publisher | AOSIS | |
| Date | 2018-03-17 | |
| Identifier | 10.4102/safp.v60i1.4680 | |
| Source | South African Family Practice; Vol 60, No 1 (2018): January/February; 46 2078-6204 2078-6190 | |
| Language | eng | |
| Relation |
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:
https://safpj.co.za/index.php/safpj/article/view/4680/5747
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