Sedation-Facilitated Sexual Violence

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• Date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016817744015
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article
Criminal Justice Review
2018, Vol. 43(1) 60-74
Sedation-Facilitated Sexual
ª 2017 Georgia State University
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DOI: 10.1177/0734016817744015
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Analysis of Media Accounts
of Medical Professionals
Who Sexually Abuse
Sedated Patients
Thomas Vander Ven1, Lauren Wright2, and Clara Fesmire1
Abstract
A recent investigative report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution exposed what appears to be widespread
sexual abuse committed by medical professionals. The report suggests that the intellectual advantages
and social prominence of well-heeled medical professionals provide them with special resources to
commit an undetected series of offenses and to avoid or reduce punishment when they are ultimately
apprehended. Thus, the story implies that medical sexual abuse and its control is shaped by power and
influence. Similarly, social constructionists argue that class and power shape debates, in part, through
the manner in which the media frames social problems. The current study seeks to explore these
issues by employing a qualitative approach to analyzing news reporting on medical professionals who
drug and sexually violate their patients. Drawing from 22 sedation-facilitated sexual violence (SFSV)
stories, we compare the media accounts of SFSV to 22 media treatments of stranger street attacks
(i.e., blitz rapes). Guided by constructionist frameworks, for example, we investigated whether or not
the language used to describe medical offenders suggested that they were more or less condemnation
worthy than “stranger” offenders who attacked their victims in public spaces. Compared to blitz
rapists, medical offenders were more likely to be referred to using admiration worthy terms (e.g.,
intelligent, exemplary), and their victims were more likely to be described as helpless and lacking in
agency. Blitz rapists are more often described as coercive and brutal, and their victims are more likely
to be framed as heroic, especially when they resist the offender.
Keywords
social constructions of crime/justice, crime/delinquency theory, criminal victimization, other,
qualitative methods
1 Department of Sociology, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA
2 Northeastern State University, Tahlequah, OK, USA
Corresponding Author:
Thomas Vander Ven, Department of Sociology, Ohio University, Athens, OH 45701, USA.
Email: vandervt@ohio.edu

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Ven et al.
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In 2016, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) investigative report alleged widespread sexual abuse
by medical professionals against their patients. In several cases, doctors were accused of sexually
violating patients while they were under sedation. The crimes were portrayed in disturbing terms.
According to an AJC investigator, “a prominent Manhattan doctor was arrested, charged with giving
a patient a powerful anesthetic in the emergency room, then masturbating on her” (Norder, 2016,
p. 1). One of the principal themes in the AJC report is that medical offenders are sometimes shielded
from punishment by using power and influence to negotiate plea deals or are given superficial
sanctions by medical licensing units and then reinstated in short order. Thus, the report suggests
that sedation-facilitated sexual violence (SFSV) is a special kind of sexual offense where the
peculiarities of the offense, the social prominence of the offenders, and the institutional corruption
or incompetence by hospitals and medical boards result in a kind of preferential treatment for
medical offenders.
Is SFSV a special kind of sexual offense? Some states have passed laws to capture the unique
qualities of violent acts committed in medical settings. For example, 10 states—including Washing-
ton, Colorado, Minnesota, and Delaware—have criminalized acts that involve health-care providers
using medical treatment or examination as a guise for committing sexual acts (Hamilton, 2016). In
legal terms, however, SFSV corresponds with most federal and state definitions of sexual offenses.
Here, we define SFSV as an attempted or executed act of sexual coercion, with or without penetra-
tion, committed by a medical professional during or in the guise of treatment, against a sedated,
anesthetized, or otherwise drugged patient. This definition is consistent with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation’s (2013) Rape Addendum, which states that rape can include offenses in which
physical force is not involved, as when offenders strategically use drugs or alcohol to temporarily
incapacitate victims. Thus, through the lens of federal law, acts of SFSV belong in the same category
as any other act of coercive sexual assault. But is SFSV a special type of violence in other ways? In
some respects, SFSV might be seen as a form of elite deviance or elite crime because it involves
“illegal or deviant activities committed by a powerful individual or entity” within an institutional
context (Michel, Heide, & Cochran, 2016, p. 2). SFSV offenders fit within this definition, as the
crime involves medical professionals who ostensibly draw upon their professional status to gain the
trust of victims and then use the tools of their profession as weapons (e.g., sedatives) and their
professional spaces as attack sites (e.g., operating rooms or recovery rooms).
The empirical literature on sex abuse or unethical sexual contact in medical settings is relatively
scarce. The first comprehensive report on this subject emerged in 1992 when investigators estimated
that nearly 1 in 10 physicians self-reported having sexual contact with their patients and 23% of
doctor respondents reported knowledge of other physicians having sexual contact with patients
(Hamilton, 2016). It is difficult to determine how SFSV compares to other forms of sexual violence,
as the empirical literature offers few clues on the nature and social correlates of SFSV. To our
knowledge, just one empirical analysis of the incidence and social distribution of sedation rape and
sexual assault has been published. Kumar, Strickland, Butterworth, and Lee (2004) examined
articles available in legal databases from 1945 to 2003 to count cases of sedation rape and sexual
assault. The investigators discovered 248 sexual assault cases involving the use of sedatives,
tranquilizers, alcohol, anesthetic agents, or other mind-altering drugs. Kumar et al. (2004) found
the most common professions associated with sedation offenders included dentists, psychiatrists,
pediatricians, gynecologists, and plastic surgeons. Less than 2% of the offenders/suspects identi-
fied were anesthesiologists. These statistics are likely to reflect just a fraction of the total number
of SFSV cases, since sexual assault cases are generally underreported and data on sexual assault
committed by health-care providers rely on self-reporting and the rare cases that reach the court-
room (Hamilton, 2016).
SFSV is clearly a unique offense given that the offenders are medical professionals (i.e., elites)
who employ sexual violence in institutional settings. As suggested by the AJC investigation, it

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Criminal Justice Review 43(1)
appears that medical offenders may use their elite status to their advantage when faced with sex
offense charges. But how does the typical news consumer encounter medical sex offenders in the
news? Are SFSV offenders depicted as more or less heinous or condemnation worthy when com-
pared to the offenders associated with other sex crimes? The current study involves an interpretive
content analysis of the language and rhetorical images used to describe sex offenders in newspaper
articles. Our objective is to assess whether—and in what manner—news accounts of medical
offenders who commit SFSV differ from news treatments of stranger street rapists. The foregoing
analysis is not an attempt to judge the intent of news reporters or to suggest that certain types of
offenders get preferential or unfair treatment in the press. Instead, we analyze the language attached
to offenders, their acts, and their victims as a way to investigate the differential ways in which news
consumers may encounter images of offenders in the media.
According to constructionist scholar Donileen Loseke (2003), media descriptions of offenders are
part of the “people production” process that is critical to the way that enduring images of social
problems are constructed. Loseke argues that specific people-types (e.g., “the deadbeat dad,” “the
crack addicted stickup artist”) conjure specific emotional responses in audiences, and those emo-
tional responses have consequences for the ways in which the public views social problems and their
solutions. Thus, following Loseke, our research objective is to use a qualitative, interpretive
approach to compare and contrast the rhetorical images associated with one type of elite devi-
ant—the medical offender—with the stranger street type. To put the current study in larger context,
we next provide a brief review of the research literature on class-based patterns found in crime news
accounts.
Class, Social Prominence, and Crime Talk in the News
Crime news accounts are ostensibly driven by the facts of a case. Ideally, extralegal variables—such
as the class, race, and social prominence of offenders and victims—should not shape crime talk in
the media. Crime news, however, is a human, social, and political construction that drives discourse
on crime (Jewkes, 2015). The scholarly literature on crime news content has offered a variety of
insights on the processes through which the media shapes the general...