Rape treatment protocol: not a language story
Toula Drimonis sorts out the background to the rape victim story told as a language scandal last week by the Journal. If anything, it’s a story about a longstanding protocol for victim treatment that isn’t well enough understood, and likely an indication that the protocol is overdue for an update.
Blork 16:02 on 2023-07-19 Permalink
This would actually be a really good case study in how reporting of a story can go off the rails, not due to conscious propaganda or other nefarious reasons but simply by taking things at face value and running with them. Journalism schools (and anyone else who is interested in how things work/don’t work) take note.
Kate 16:45 on 2023-07-19 Permalink
Blork, you don’t detect any propaganda? It definitely felt to me like QMI was thrilled to have got hold of what looked like a story about an anglo institution behaving badly.
bob 16:48 on 2023-07-19 Permalink
This was a hit job. And the article as amended is still garbage.
MtlWeb 17:56 on 2023-07-19 Permalink
Anyone who has been employed at one (or more) of the McGill University affiliated hospitals during the past 33 years can attest that our centers are fully bilingual and will care for not just the francophone & anglophone patients/families but many of the other linguistic backgrounds who populate our city/province. In fact, contrary to popular belief, most of our patients are indeed francophones, which makes demographic sense. Also, most of our RN staff in the ERs are on average younger & francophone in origin, but also bilingual. The rest of the multi-disciplinary personnel, including the staff MDs, are bilingual and can communicate in both languages non-stop throughout their shifts. Yes, the residents/fellows who are from the Middle-East have little knowledge of written/spoken French but there is always another staff member available who will translate with them at the bedside; it can be difficult to expect these guys/girls to learn this language as they are here for 3-4-5 years and work a ton of hours during their residency. The public needs to understand that without these international medical students/residents/fellows covering our patient care units and surgical clinics/ORs throughout the 24h of each day, their hospitalized loved ones would not receive the monitoring and care they presently do in these university-affiliated sites. Without them ‘learning on the fly’ during their various medical/surgical rotations which includes covering shifts throughout the week and maintaining the care as managed by the staff MD, patients on the wards would be dependent on an ER doc being free to see them when called by the nursing staff for a developing event/issue…and if that ER doc is not available, then that care waits for the morning when the staff doc will start his day – this is what occurs in a non-university-affiliated hospital of which we have several examples across the 514/450 area…..so, yes, the data has shown that you do get better care in a teaching hospital even if you have to answer the same questions about your history 10x. It would be ideal if the media (Allison Hanes did in this article) would stop referring to these McGill-affiliated sites as anglophone hospitals but instead as bilingual.
I wish the rabid click-bait media devoted even half the time it wasted on the language BS on how to better support a sexual assault victim in 2023, no matter their native tongue.
walkerp 18:03 on 2023-07-19 Permalink
There was clearly some hysteria here, but I think that we are too quickly how this impacts many francophones here. I get and broadly agree with Toula’s more nuanced take and that this issue is much more a problem of how backwards we still are when it comes to sexual assault (and how badly run our health care system is). However, a priori, it is pretty fucked that a francophone in a francophone province can be turned away from a hospital because the service they need can not be delivered in french. I know, I know, it’s the protocol, but still how crazy is it that there is a protocol that denies the native-speaking population from a crucial service?
Imagine if there was the same situation in B.C. and a rape victim was turned away from a hospital because they could only be served in Cantonese or Urdu? People would freak the fuck out.
There is a ton of ignorant nationalistic language propaganda here in Quebec, driven by Quebecor and Legault and his allies and it’s awful. At the same time, it doesn’t help us anglos to dismiss a situation when it does arise and try desperately to argue why language is not an issue.
Blork 18:07 on 2023-07-19 Permalink
Kate, I’m not saying there wasn’t a propaganda angle, but I’m not sure if it was conscious or just knee-jerk (as in: confirms the bias so just run with it).
bob 19:21 on 2023-07-19 Permalink
If it was knee-jerk does that make it better? I think it makes it worse when the natural reaction to something just happens to be bigoted distortions. And I think it is obvious that this is entirely intentional, given the lack of follow-up.
walkerp – There was no denial of service, she was not turned away, and your BC comparison is absurd, because you can be served in French at the MGH, and for that matter any other hospital – even the Jewish, oh my!. The first words of the mission statement of the MGH are “As a leading, bilingual academic health centre…”
She was not refused service, she was referred to a different hospital which by virtue of a *forty year old* protocol is better suited to take care of her, and in the same way she was not refused service at the CHUM, but referred to a hospital better suited to take care of her. If the protocol had been followed, her first stop would have been Notre Dame, and there would be nothing to talk about in the press.
The Drimonis article tries to sideline the bigotry of the propaganda by raising ancillary issues that aren’t even really issues (and which the Journal article completely ignores). This protocol has been in place for forty years, apparently without raising these issues – and it makes sense on the face of it, more than a hospital the size of the CHUM not being able (read: not being willing) to process a rape kit.
She quotes an anonymous bureaucrat: “Implementing healthcare directives based on language, such as directing English-speaking patients to the MGH and French-speaking ones to Notre Dame, seems anachronistic in the context of our increasingly multicultural society,” – cool, but Quebec is officially not a multicultural society – sayeth Legault, “It’s important that we don’t put all cultures on the same level; that’s why we oppose multiculturalism. We prefer to concentrate on what we call interculturalism, where we have one culture, the Quebec culture, and we try to integrate newcomers.” Anachronistic, sure – but it accommodates a prevailing anachronistic mentality.
Here is a better comparison than that fatuous one. If it is true that she was refused service at the MGH because she is francophone, then it is equally true that she was refused service at the CHUM because she was sexually assaulted. There’s a different headline for you – “Victime de viol: le CHUM la refuse… car elle etait victime de viol.” I guess that didn’t dawn on her, or if it did it didn’t make it to the court records or the papers. Perfectly true, though – “the CHUM refuses services to women if they have been sexually assaulted”.