4 days Ago By Rema Nagarajan
Medical students and doctors take part in a candle light protest against the murder of a doctor in Kolkata (PTI file photo) Even as doctors protest across the country for safety inside hospitals, fresh entrants in several medical colleges are being forced by seniors to memorise and read aloud from booklets filled with vulgar abuses, lauding sexual violence against women in general - and against their female classmates and nurses in particular - in the name of ragging. These 'ragging' sessions and booklets are described by experts in gender violence as grooming in rape culture. Freshers are told to learn the content in the booklets titled 'medical sahitya' or 'personality development programme' and always keep the copies with them.
These encourage freshers to look at women of all ages as sex objects. For instance, in the list of acronyms is BHMB (badi hokar maal banegi), and that's the only expansion in the list that is just about printable! Activist: Vulgar booklets promoting rape culture According to freshers, they are forced to read aloud from the booklet and if they stumble or laugh, they have to start over. There are descriptions of stages of breast development comparing them with fruits or vegetables, starting from 0-15 age group.
There are disrespectful references to cadavers. Every reference to women, including their classmates, is about violent, forceful sexual acts and description of genitalia in the crudest possible terms and nurses are consistently portrayed as 'being available' and willing, indeed craving, to be sexually assaulted by doctors. Jasmeen Patheja, founder of Blank Noise which is working on a project called 'Campus of Belonging' in colleges, describes it as encouraging rape culture.
A senior female doctor said, "Joking about patients' bodies when they are lying unconscious on the operation table is some of the cheapest things that I have seen male anaesthesiologists and surgeons do. This kind of grooming produces doctors who would do such things." Another doctor recounted her college experience, and said, "As students, we stood around male doctors asking young women to take off their clothes while they showed us how to do a 'breast examination'.
The women were touched without consent and unnecessarily." Sunita Sheel Bandewar of Forum for Medical Ethics Society said: " Seniors who indulge into such gross ragging practices might be a threat to women colleagues across the spaces.".
