“The worst thing is that the hospitals and the police are unable to protect the most vulnerable. The police don’t have time to record crimes and investigate them.
From January 2019 to October 2022, more than two thousand rapes and around 4,500 cases of sexual harassment were reported in UK hospitals, writes the Daily Mail.
Every week, dozens of rapes and sexual assaults occur in UK hospitals, the publication reports. Official figures have revealed lawlessness on a horrifying scale: in just three years, 6,500 attacks have been recorded – including gang rapes and cases of paedophilia. At the same time, only 4% of cases ended up in court. The data was released by the Women’s Advocacy Network, whose founder Heather Binning said was “just the tip of the iceberg”.
“In hospitals, everyone – patients, staff and visitors – should feel completely safe, but rapes and violent assaults happen every week,” she added. “The figures show that it is not necessary to talk about security. Now it’s practically a market for sex offenders. It’s just awful.”
According to UK statistics, from January 2019 to October 2022 there were at least 2,088 rapes and 4,451 sexual harassments – a total of 33 cases per week. Whether the crimes were committed in public hospitals or private clinics is not specified separately. In addition, one in seven cases occurred directly in the hospital ward.
Heather Binning said “the worst thing is that hospitals and the police are unable to protect the most vulnerable. The police do not have time to record crimes and investigate them, although these are places with CCTV and limited access.
The UK Women’s Advocacy Network has called on the National Health Service, the Health Care Quality Commission and the police to recognize this “hidden area of sexual abuse”.
Binning also said, “These stats are just mind blowing. We started the investigation out of concern for the safety of women and children on hospital wards and were horrified by what we found. The scale of sexual assaults and rapes is all the more appalling given that these data cover a pandemic when the whole country was under quarantine and hospitals were said to have increased their vigilance.
So among the crimes recorded are a crime against a girl under 13 and a gang rape of a woman in hospitals in the West Midlands. Three young girls and a boy were raped at medical facilities in Cambridgeshire and six girls were attacked at hospitals in Lancashire.
Joe Phoenix, professor of forensic science at the University of Reading and author of the report, said the National Health Service is “failing in its mandate to protect both patients and staff”. No one can yet explain exactly what caused the spike in rape in British hospitals, but sociologists attribute it to the general decline in morals seen in Europe over the past decade.
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