Steven retweetledi
What kind of country have we become when a hospital bed is no longer a place of refuge but a place of risk?
Let’s strip away the polite language and the bureaucratic fog for a moment. Children. Children. Sexually assaulted while receiving medical care. Not on a dark street. Not in some lawless corner of society. In hospitals. Under the watch of a system that exists for one purpose only, to protect, to heal, to care.
And what do we get in response? Committees. Reviews. “Frameworks.” A quango promising to “monitor” the problem through a system the public can barely access. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so morally grotesque.
This is not a failure of policy. It is a failure of courage.
Because when nearly 80% of hospitals are not even reporting these incidents, we are no longer dealing with isolated breakdowns. We are looking at a culture that prefers concealment over confrontation. Reputation management over human dignity. Optics over truth.
And here’s the brutal reality no one in power seems willing to say out loud. If you cannot guarantee basic safety in a hospital ward, you have no business lecturing the public about “care pathways,” “trauma-informed approaches,” or any of the other soft, padded language that fills reports while real people are being harmed.
This is what institutional decay looks like. Not dramatic collapse, but quiet tolerance. A slow, sickening normalisation of what should never be normal.
And don’t miss the most chilling line in all of this.
Patients can choose whether to report to the police. As if the burden of justice should sit on the shoulders of someone who has just been violated. As if silence equals consent. As if fear, confusion, and vulnerability are somehow conditions for informed choice.
No. That is abdication dressed up as compassion.
A civilised society is measured by how it protects the vulnerable when they cannot protect themselves. On that measure, this is not just a scandal. It is an indictment.
If this does not provoke outrage, if this does not force immediate, visible, uncompromising action, then we are not drifting anymore. We have arrived. And where we have arrived is a place where the most basic duty of care has been hollowed out and replaced with paperwork.
Hospitals should be sanctuaries. Right now, they are failing to be even safe. And that should shame every single person responsible for allowing it to continue.
marion scott@ladymcbeth2
Children are among the hundreds of women sexually assaulted in our hospitals as we reveal gov quango plan to document attacks within secretive system supposed to examine medical blunders which is inaccessible to public. @WRNScotland @MaryHowden
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