Even during a pandemic, female doctors are facing harassment

DOCTORS across Pakistan and all over the world are on the frontlines during the coronavirus pandemic.

While a lot of them are working tirelessly in hospitals – isolating themselves from their families and risking their own lives – testing and treating patients, many have also volunteered their services to raise awareness and made themselves available to answer any concerns of civilians.

All around social media, folks are sharing their appreciation for medical workers, calling them heroes and warriors. Surely they’re getting the respect they deserve, right?

Well, in Pakistan, the male doctors are – can’t say the same for women.

Apparently, even a pandemic can’t stop predators from harassing women in the medical field who are utilising their time to help those in need. And those doctors have had enough.

According to one Dr Summaiya Syed Tariq, in three days after she started volunteering for online medical consultation, she had to report and block 14 cell numbers.

“They all wanted nothing but lewd chitchat and ‘frandship’. The extent to which our men can go down to never ceases to amaze me,” she said on Twitter.

For female doctors, this is not a new case though, says Dr Anza.

“It starts right from when you join med school. If you mention it on your social media profile or even hint at it, the messages start pouring.

“What’s weird is how they always start off in an eerily ‘respectful’ manner, saying ‘Hello doctor sahiba’ and then it goes off in a bad direction. Sometimes it’s from other doctors – or people claiming to be doctors/med students.”

Dr Fizza* started facing problems after becoming a volunteer.

“Sometimes they would start off like a real patient but things would take a shift. And I’d ignore it a lot because I’d think, ‘They’re just trolls’, but sometimes the messages would be too graphic and come with pictures and videos that would just ruin my day. I knew of such things happening but seeing it for myself was depressing.”

Dr Aleeza*, the founder of an online telemedicine company, opened up more about the virtual harassment faced by her team. Her company has a team of female doctors who digitally connect with patients that need healthcare.

“We have an app through which patients can directly connect with female doctors and have a consultation via chat, audio or video call,” says Dr Aleeza.

“In April, we made our app free for the coming three months so that people could use it during this pandemic to ask about Covid-19 symptoms, screenings, etc, especially because of the lockdown and the load in hospitals, a person shouldn’t have to go in just for a consultation.

“We made the app free to help people and every now and then, someone calls to say ‘I love you’ to a doctor who could be helping a person who needs it, saying ‘Please talk to me’, ‘What are you doing’, ‘Tell me about yourself ’. As soon as someone starts doing so, we block them. We’ve had enough to know how to deal with them now.”

For this app and its doctors, the preparation came from a previous spammer attack. Dr Aleeza reveals that they had been facing issues long before they made their app free. People were willing to pay to troll female doctors who just wanted to do their job.

“Around two months ago, we had a spammer attack where a number of men started calling all our doctors, booking their slots, which the doctor couldn’t unbook for another patient and bombarding them with missed calls. The doctors couldn’t see any other patients.

“Then those guys started having inappropriate conversations, sending vulgar pictures and porn site links within the session ... again, this was when the app wasn’t even free. They were paying to do all this! I guess we did make good money from it.”

Dr Aleeza and her team took immediate action to figuring it out and reducing the trolling.

“We reported it and added some checks on our app after which it reduced significantly but they’re still there.”

She adds, “We do our best to help our doctors but it’s sad that we have to mentally prepare them for this.

“There should be more talk about this because a lot of hospitals are using telemedicine now.

“A lot of doctors, especially female doctors, will face this abuse.” — Dawn