Sexual harassment in the physician-patient interaction: analysis of charges against doctors in the state of São Paulo

OBJECTIVE: This research intends to discuss sexual harassment within the doctor-patient relationship based on four parameters: doctor's characteristics, accuser's characteristics, accusation characteristics, and the evaluation by the Medicine Council of São Paulo. METHOD: It is a descriptive, quantitative approach using a retrospective documental analysis. Studied subjects were doctors who were allegedly engaged in sexual harassment. This analysis considered all accusations made from January 2000 to December 2005 (n=150). RESULTS: For this type of sexual abuse, there was a prevalence of male professionals (96.6%) who committed abuse against female patients (90.3%) during adulthood (77.7%). The mean age of the accused was 46.87 years, ranging from 30-76 years, concentrated between 46-75 years. The intrinsic difficulty of understanding sexual harassment by a professional constrained ethical evaluation of the cases, with 24.1% of the cases being considered proceeding charges by the professional council. When the cases were recognized as proceeding, they were either filed (88.2%) or were considered to be ethical infringement (11.8%) becoming Professional Ethical Process (PEP). In the majority of proceeding cases (87%), there was a Police Occurrence Report enclosed. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: The incidence of sexual abuse by professionals was independent of education, as the accused professionals came from a large variety of medical colleges, without significant differences related to institution. The predominance of accusations against older professionals may occur due to the frail personality structure that allows professional acting out. Objective evidence is very important in ethical evaluations compared to psychological and subjective evidence.