In a recent edition of the Sunday Observer, editor-at-large, H.G. Helps reported to the Jamaican public that there has been "a dramatic jump in complaints against medical doctors, including accusations of patient rape".

According to this report, the Medical Council of Jamaica has been jolted out of its slumber and has decided to go into a proactive mode to avoid lawsuits and promote patients' rights.

In order to achieve these lofty goals, the Council will insist that all doctors who practise medicine in Jamaica will be required to "attend a seminar in bio-ethics" as a prerequisite for obtaining their licence. It is interesting to note, as Helps did in his article, that the medical fraternity is trying to come to grips with the underbelly of their profession at the same time that Andrew Holness, Minister of Education is being forced to pay attention to the sexual abuse of children in the schoolrooms of the nation. Before long, the minister will have to bring to Parliament a "tek oonu han off the pickney dem bill".

The irony of the problem that now is slamming the face of the medical and the teaching professions lies in the fact that many people outside and inside these professions knew what has been going on long before council chairman Dr Trevor McCartney and bio-ethicist Dr Derrick Aarons were born.

In regard to the medical profession, I am surprised that courses in bio-ethics were not a compulsory part of the training package in every medical school in the modern world. It is also surprising that currently bio-ethics is being defined in the narrowest of framework to cover issues related to "homosexuality, cloning, ganja-smoking, mercy-killing and medical malpractice".

While all these issues are of overwhelming and immediate concern no course or seminar on the ethical behaviours of any professional can be taught outside of a gender-analytic framework. Such a framework does not appear to inform the content of the course that is now being proposed for our doctors.

Also, as far as I know, the lack of a gendered approach in teacher training is still woefully lacking in spite of some of the courageous efforts of some of the persons in the universities in the country.

While there has been no reported sex-disaggregated data on the number of complaints against doctors and teachers received by both Dr McCartney and Minister Holness, I am sure that very few if any female are among these professionals who have been reported as perpetrators of the sexual violation and harassment of their patients and students.

It means, therefore, that these violators of our human rights are not aberrations. They are the outcomes and products of the patriarchal mindset that has contributed to the best and the worst of human behaviours at all levels of the society.

The legacy of the patriarch has always surfaced in the practice of medicine, this is because doctors, in their role of healers of sick bodies and minds, have historically been revered and placed at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy by all and sundry.

This predisposition to revere the doctor is particularly true of the lower sectors of the population. For them, the doctor can do no wrong. He is close to the Great Spirit in the scheme of things. When the doctor cannot save us, we have no choice but to pray.

The mystique of the doctor was also maintained by the patriarchal structures that prevented women from entering the halls of the academy in general and the schools of medicine for a very long time.

Today, these barriers have been broken, but the idea that it is a man's world lingers and this is why some doctors in contemporary Jamaica continue the tradition of the sexual abuse and control of some of their female patients and workers within their field.

To illustrate the point that I am trying to make, I will bring to my readers' attention one scenario that I came across in my readings.

According to my historical source, in 1858, in Victorian England a respected gynaecologist name Isaac Baker-Brown put forward a most bizarre theory about women.

The power of the clitoris

He convinced many of his colleagues that the diseases that present themselves in women can be attributed to the nervous system and the pubic nerve which runs into the clitoris.

He discouraged masturbation because, in his distorted psyche, this practice put undue stress on women's health. According to this doctor and his cronies, every imaginable human health problem, including idiocy was to be blamed on the power of the clitoris.

At this point in time, there was a real campaign among the stakeholders of Church and the medical profession to prevent women and girls from masturbating and when it was observed that all the screaming, shouting, hand-clapping and the application of the caustic substances to the vagina did not stop the female of the species from pleasuring herself, the revered Dr Baker-Brown recommended excision of the clitoris as the solution to the taming of the female.

According to this powerful medical man of his time, "once the wound was healed, intractable women became happy wives, rebellious teenage girls settled back into the bosom of their families and married women formerly averse to sexual duties, become pregnant".

This historical fact impacted on the understanding of many feminists in regard to the meaning of female genital mutilation and enlightened us to the realisation that such barbaric practices were not the prerogative of Africa and the Middle East. The English were the best manifestation of the royal patriarchs and it is their vision of the world order that still propels some of our learned professionals to misuse their power in their private and public medical practices.

Dysfunctional behaviours

Of course the dysfunctional behaviours that are identified in the medical professions are not qualitatively different from those in other professions such as teaching, policing, the political directory and other public services.

The abuse of little girls in the classrooms of the nation has been going on for decades. If rural women of my vintage had the courage to tell the truth about the one-room school houses in which the headmaster ruled the roost, we would write stories about the terror in the eyes of every girl who made it to the sixth class. Such a girl had to be constantly holding on her skirt hem and crossing her legs to prevent the pervert of a headmaster from fondling her.

The boys were constantly peaking under the desks to see what was going on. Of course, no parent reported these horrible men. They had a field day touching and fondling the girls and violently beating the boys with leather straps and sticks to prevent them from achieving intellectually and from taking an interest in the girls of their own age group.

I could be mistaken, but Minister Andrew Holness is the first minister of education that has raised so publicly, the red flag on sexual abuse of students by teachers.

In this same period when the public media have developed the courage to bring to the public the unethical sexual behaviours of doctors and teachers, the situation in the police force has also been highlighted again.

The Gleaner of February 20 carried a Western Bureau report which alerted the nation to the planned big changes for the Jamaica Constabulary Forces that the Commissioner of Police Rear Admiral Hardley Lewin will be overseeing. According to this report, the commissioner said the changes would be based on the outcomes of a strategic review that had been carried out of the force.

Against this informed and documented template, the Jamaican citizenry can expect to see changes in the culture of policing. Serious attention will be paid to corruption in the police force; there will be heightened measures to ensure accountability and noticeable elevation of the standards of l eadership, management and professionalism.

High levels of harassment

What gives us hope is that the commissioner has made a commitment to implement these recommendations. Hopefully, this report will not join the others on dusty chi-chi infested shelves! Hip, hip, hooray!

The commissioner is also reported to have given some direction to the other organisations. According to The Gleaner report, "The police commissioner also went on to say that other organisations in Jamaica needed to follow suit and purge themselves of inefficiencies and corruption."

We hope that the commissioner of police will not forget the news report about the unacceptable high levels of sexual harassment within the police force that was highlighted during his predecessor's term of office. Since then there was also a highly reported case of rape of a female police officer by her male colleague.

Certainly, the time has come for the mandatory mainstreaming of gender issues into the training programme of all professionals in our society. The reality is that the notion of gender equality and the empowerment of women is still a pre-occupation of a small fringe element in the society.

That is why over the last 10 years many useless meetings on the development of a sexual-harassment policy to present to Parliament have been convened in various meeting rooms in hotels and in offices of the public sector.

Daily reports

These gatherings have not resulted in any document that has been presented to the legislators of the Jamaican Parliament. In the meantime, all the horrendous incidence of sexual abuse in various professions are being reported on a daily basis.

The chicken-hawks and the vultures are certainly coming home to roost while we continue to hold our noses to avoid the distinctive stench of the rot in the Jamaican social systems.

Dr Glenda Simms is a consultant on gender issues. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.