From 16 to 17 April 2020 there will be a symposium at the University of Newcastle in Australia about “sexual violence, medicine and psychiatry”. The organisers (SHaME and the Centre for the Study of Violence) are now looking for submissions. The deadline for submission is Monday, 25 November 2019. Below you find the scope of the conference. More detailed information can be found here.

“This symposium will explore the role of medical professionals in debates about sexual violence. Police doctors and forensic medical examiners, GPs, gynaecologists, surgeons, nurses, midwives, prison surgeons, psychiatrists, and therapists working in all forms of institutional and community settings have been influential agents in the interpretation, medicalisation, and adjudication of sexual attacks. This is an important time to investigate the relationship between medical professionals and sexual violence. Scandals around medical and psychiatric responses to sexual abuse emerge on a regular basis (viz. Nauru detention camp; the abuse of people in psychiatric wards, prison, and detention camps; failures to send the biological samples from ‘rape kits’ for forensic examination; complaints about medical examinations; popular anxieties about the medical treatment and rehabilitation of violent offenders). The symposium seeks to promote human health through providing insights into the role of medicine and psychiatry in understanding sexual violence.

The ‘Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry’ symposium invites proposal submissions from any region of the world and any humanities/arts/social science discipline (i.e. includes history, sociology, law, philosophy, medical humanities, anthropology, art and visual culture, etc.). The emphasis is on any period from the late eighteenth century to the present.”