“Putting in a speculum like a nag without telling me is rape. To continue despite my screams, my tears, and telling myself that I am exaggerating, is rape. Asking two interns to hold my legs before doing it again is rape. » Linda (who wished to remain anonymous) filed a complaint against Professor Emile Daraï, specialist in endometriosis, in November 2021, for a consultation dating from 2018. She talks about ” torture “of “brutality”, the impossibility, since, to be examined. Above all, she poses a word that disturbs the medical profession in this case: rape.
Linda is not the only one to accuse the former head of the gynecology-obstetrics department of the Tenon hospital in Paris: twenty-five complaints have been filed against him, including several for rape. Behind the Daraï affair has pointed out for several months a legal and societal debate around a question: a medical examination carried out in a sexual organ can it be qualified as rape?
In a report submitted at the beginning of December 2021, the internal commission of inquiry of the Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris thus underlines that, of the twenty patients who testified against the practitioner, three of them used the “word “rape” in the sense of non-consent to a speculum insertion or a vaginal and/or rectal examination”. But if they come under “shortcomings” in “the collection of consent to certain gestures” and failure to take into account “pain relief”the rapporteurs specify that they do not retain “no sexual connotation”.
“One responds to one excess with another”
At the beginning of January, the Paris prosecutor’s office went in the same direction and opened a judicial investigation for “willful violence by a person in charge of a public service mission”, dismissing the qualification of “rape” by considering that there was no no sexual intent. But the debate is not closed, since the examining magistrate can retain another count of prosecution, including rape, if he decides on an indictment – which is not the case at present.
A worrying prospect for the National College of Gynecologists and obstetricians, who issued a statement in June expressing concern about the current use of the word “rape” to qualify gynecological examinations “made without any sexual intention” and asking “that henceforth a clear distinction be made between acts of a sexual nature and vaginal or rectal medical examinations carried out within the framework of medical care”.
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