By Alexander Chianese
“Please take care of me.”
I hear those five words from patients all the time. They fuel my passion as a nurse — and they have haunted me since I was 5-years-old.
I can remember hearing the laughter of children outside, the barking of dogs in the neighbor’s yard. My parents were gone for the day. Inside our home, our place of refuge, I was alone with the new babysitter.
He lured me with sweets and smiles. He undressed me and lathered me in peanut butter. He forced me to perform sexual acts, touched me, and raped me.
My parents came home to find me in the fetal position, naked. The babysitter was gone. The smell of peanut butter lingered on my flesh. I whimpered one phrase: “Please take care of me.”
My parents rushed me to the emergency department. But their frantic cries fell on deaf ears. They were told to wait in a long line of patients who had yet to be seen. After a full three hours, a doctor fired questions at my parents about the “alleged” assault.
The hospital staff performed a cursory exam. No injuries were noted. No samples were taken. They dismissed my parents and said I was in “good health” and that “kids imagine things all the time.” My parents followed up with local authorities, but by then it was too late.
No proof. No case.
After years of therapy, I became less of a victim and more a survivor. Today, I’m a registered psychiatric nurse. And I know that my painful experience is a familiar tale to many.
Every 73 seconds, an American falls victim to sexual assault. According to a National Sexual Violence Resource Center report, 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men in the U.S. have been raped. About 300,000 to 700,000 adult women are victims of sexual assault each year in the U.S., but only 40,000 are treated in the hospital.
Healthcare workers are often the first to speak with victims after their assault. But patients wait hours before they’re treated, and once they are, the exams are tragically inept. As I’ve seen firsthand, healthcare workers are in dire need of specialized training and standardized protocols. Otherwise, the victims will feel even more helpless and alone.
New Jersey Assembly Bill 2331 provides a solution. It requires hospitals with emergency services to provide sexual assault treatment training to their workers, addressing the medical, psychological and emotional trauma. The bill would also ensure that sexual assault victims are treated within 90 minutes of their arrival at the hospital. This wait time would be a major improvement over the New Jersey average of 166 minutes: the 6th highest wait time in the nation. And once examined, the treatment would include the collection of forensic evidence — a necessary step in helping the victim seek justice.
Opponents of Bill 2331 may assume that healthcare workers have already received enough training on how to treat victims of sexual assault. But medical and nursing programs focus far more on referring victims to specialists than learning how to treat the victims themselves. One study found that more than 25% of healthcare practitioners and almost 50% of nurses had little confidence in their ability to screen for sexual abuse, much like a math teacher who can add and subtract — but not multiply.
Other objectors may argue that added training is too costly for hospitals. A 2017 study found that the average financial cost associated with sexual assault per patient includes $48,029 for medical care, $63,744 in loss of income, and $9,250 in legal fees. But this doesn’t take into account the survivor’s trauma, which can persist across years, costly therapy sessions and countless treatments.
Sponsors of the bipartisan bill include Assemblywomen Carol A. Murphy and Valerie Vainieri Huttle. Reach out to the assemblyperson in your district and ask them to co-sponsor Bill 2331. You can help this bill get the attention it needs.
The next time someone cries for help, saying those five haunting words, I want them to know they’re not alone. Finally, someone can take care of them.
Alexander Chianese, BSN, RN-BC, is a staff nurse at Virtua Memorial Hospital in Mount Holly and enrolled in the Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
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