Doctors not available to examine rape victims

RAPE victims being taken to sexual assault treatment units in Dublin, Cork and Donegal are finding there is no doctor available to examine them when they arrive.

Dublin Rape Crisis Centre (DRCC) chief executive Ellen O’Malley Dunlop said the victims, who were accompanied by gardaí, were turning up at the units still wearing the clothes in which they were assaulted.

“It is just barbaric to be left like that,” she said.

Not only was the situation prolonging the ordeal for the victims, it was delaying the gathering of crucial forensic evidence, Ms O’Malley Dunlop said.

She said the country’s four sexual assault treatment centres in Dublin, Cork, Waterford and Letterkenny were stretched to the limit. “All the units are saturated and the doctors are burnt out,” she said. At times units in Dublin, Cork and Letterkenny had no doctor available.

Ms O’Malley Dunlop said the Dublin unit, based in the Rotunda Hospital, was particularly overstretched because a third of the people it saw were from areas of the country where there were no treatment units.

A Government review, published in June, said €2.8 million was needed to upgrade and maintain the four units and to provide units in the west and midlands.