A sexist banner shows a naked, unconscious woman immersed in a glass of cocktail with an explicit mention of GHB, the “rapist drug”. It was used as decoration on September 16 for an integration evening for medical students from the University of Tours. And the consequences were not long in coming. The presidency of the establishment announced this Tuesday that it had made a report to the public prosecutor’s office and taken sanctions against a student association. The Tours public prosecutor immediately announced that she had opened an investigation.
Other alerts concerning “acts of hazing and sexual assaults committed during medical student evenings” were also received by the administration, specifies the university press release.
The competent authorities were also contacted “so that an administrative investigation likely to result in disciplinary action be carried out”.
“Symptomatic” behavior
Pending the conclusions of the investigation, the University of Tours has “decided to suspend the certification” of the Carabins de Tours association, which is in question, and to no longer grant it subsidies. “Once again medicine is in the spotlight […] This type of behavior is not an isolated case and is only symptomatic of the culture of hypersexualization and rape,” denounced student associations in a press release published on social networks.
The making of the banner takes place in the context of the Mazan trial, where Dominique Pelicot is accused of having drugged, raped and had his wife raped by dozens of men over ten years.
On September 23, the Order of Physicians launched a survey of 285,000 medical professionals and interns on sexist and sexual violence suffered in the professional context, in order to “measure the extent of the phenomenon”.