U.S. Rape Victims Shortchanged in ER, Study Finds
Originally published by Reuters Health, June 3, 2002
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Half of all U.S. women who are sexually assaulted are not given recommended treatments to prevent pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases, researchers said on Monday.
Black women are nearly twice as likely as white women to get the medical care recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the study, done by a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, determined.
"Based on our evidence, there is a significant number of adult women who do not receive proper screening and treatment to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases following a sexual assault," Dr. David Bishai, who helped lead the study, said in a statement.
"This points to a need for hospital emergency rooms to develop better programs for medical management of sexual assault patients or to refer patients to other hospitals that have developed this expertise."
Writing in the June issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine, the researchers said they found 20 percent of women who went to emergency rooms after being raped were given emergency contraception to prevent pregnancy and 58 percent were either screened for sexually transmitted diseases or given drugs to prevent infection.
The researchers used data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey, which took statistics from emergency rooms and clinics from 1992 to 1998.
They calculated 91,974 people are raped in the United States each year—close to the 97,000 rapes reported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The hospital records showed that 42 percent of sexual assault survivors were not tested for sexually transmitted diseases and were given no antibiotics.
They said 48 percent of white women did not appear to have been given either screening or treatment, compared to 25 percent of African American women.
