This article was published in a Special Issue of the journal Social History of Medicine, titled ‘Cultures of Harm in Institutions of Care’. Louise Hide investigates the consequences of unlocking psychiatric wards and allowing male and female patients and staff to mix freely in the post-war period. She argues that the sexes were allowed to socialise with each other primarily for the benefit of male patients, and that some superintendents were ‘blind’ to the dangers of sexual abuse to which female patients were exposed, especially given the growing number of male ‘sexual psychopaths’ who were being admitted to open wards. While male nurses did complain about mixed wards in the mid 1960s, it was not until the rise of feminism and patient activism that the extent of sexual abuse and violence in hospitals began to be revealed a decade later. By the 1980s, despite calls to return to segregated living, psychiatric hospitals were no longer able to fund single-sex wards, exposing many women to sexual danger and deterring them from seeking help as in-patients.
Louise Hide
‘In Plain Sight: Open Doors, Mixed-sex Wards and Sexual Abuse in English Psychiatric Hospitals, 1950s-Early 1990s’
Social History of Medicine, Volume 31, Issue 4 (November 2018), pp. 732–753
https://doi.org/10.1093/shm/hky091
Published: 08 November 2018
RELATED READING:
Joanna Bourke’s essay:
‘Police Surgeons and Victims of Rape: Cultures of Harm and Care’.
Louise Hide and Joanna Bourke
‘Introduction’ to ‘Cultures of Harm in Institutions of Care’.