The Rape Crisis Centre has called for sexual assault units to be set up in every major hospital after a Limerick teenager who claimed she was raped had to wait in vain for hours for a medical examination. Limerick Regional Hospital does not have a sexual assault unit.
The 17-year-old girl waited for five hours in Henry Street Garda station i tried to find a doctor to examine her. when she went there at 10 p.m. last Tuesday, saying she had been raped on Sunday evening in Denmark Street.
Gardai were unable to contact a doctor and she was taken home at 3 a.m. The girl then waited for a doctor's surgery to open the following morning. It is understood she was subsequently examined, and the allegation is being investigated.
The Rape Crisis Centre's director, Ms Olive Braiden, said it was absolutely vital to have a dedicated unit in every major centre, as it was important for doctors examining rape victims to have a special interest in the work and to empathise with a victim's pain and trauma.
"A doctor is usually the first person the victim meets, and she's supersensitive to how she's treated, and it's vital that she's not asked unnecessary questions and she is believed," she said.
"For a young woman to have been raped and then to have faced the ordeal of waiting all those hours, one couldn't imagine anything worse at a time like that."
According to Ms Braiden, rape victims have had to travel to the sexual assault unit in the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin from Drogheda, Monaghan and Dundalk.
That unit was set up in 1985, and the Rape Crisis Centre is involved in training doctors there. The centre's staff also operate a call-out service for victims who want someone to accompany them to the unit for an examination.