‘Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry’
Wellcome Trust Investigator Award
Joanna Bourke is PI of a new five-year Investigator Award funded by the Wellcome Trust. There are three post-docs and two PhD scholarships associated with the project, together with opportunities to engage with the public. We particularly welcome collaborations with medics, rape crisis centres, and other interested parties.
About the project
Medical professionals play central roles in examining, treating, and counselling victims of sexual violence. Their scrutiny of the complainant’s body is decisive in determining whether or not the police take the assault seriously and whether legal proceedings are instigated. Women, men, and children who are sexually abused depend on the medical and psychiatric professionals for physical and emotional care. Physicians play significant roles in determining whether an accused person is subsequently convicted, punished, or treated. The research focuses on the constituent parts of the UK, US, Australia, and New Zealand between the first decade of the nineteenth century and the present. However, we are particularly keen to involve people outside English-language regions. There will be four Research Streams: 1) Medicine and Law; 2) GPs, Police Surgeons and Forensic Medical Examiners; 3) From Psychopathia Sexualis to the DSM/ICD; 4) Psychiatric Aftermaths. There will also be a research theme on child sexual abuse, attached to one or more of the Research Streams.
For more information, please contact Professor Bourke at j.bourke@bbk.ac.uk.
Wellcome Trust Medical Humanities Fellowship
Louise Hide has been awarded a three-year Medical Humanities Research Fellowship by the Wellcome Trust for her project ‘Hiding in Plain Sight. Cultures of Harm in Residential Institutions for Long-Term adult care, Britain 1945-1980s’.
About the project
During the 1970s and early ‘80s, a number of major investigations were conducted into abuse and neglect in long-stay psychiatric hospitals. These inquiries focused primarily on administrative and management failures, giving little attention to the underlying values and belief systems – staff attitudes to pain, suffering, institutionalisation and care – that contributed to abusive practices, or to the language and behaviours that perpetuated them. In this project, she will return to the extensive documentation generated by two of these inquiries, together with other sources, and ask new and different questions to gain deeper insights into the underlying factors that gave rise to institutional abuse. The project will seek to provide current inquiries, policy-makers, health workers and clinicians, and social scientists with valuable historical context around abuse, whilst introducing a new strand of inquiry into historical scholarship. Engagement with the wider public will be vital to the project.
