Like pediatrics, family medicine, and mental health, gynecology is a medical specialty to which predators are attracted. Each specialty gives abusers access to numerous potential victims. An investigative report by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution identified over 3,100 individual physicians named in sexual misconduct reports brought to state medical boards between 1999 and 2016. However, the AJC found that these numbers represent only a fraction of the actual cases, as many violations never came to the attention of state regulators.
As the AJC reports revealed, most of these criminals were permitted to continue preying on vulnerable people for years or decades because administrators and licensing boards did nothing.
A hospital that allows a predatory doctor to continue harming patients is not a neutral bystander. It is a relational system that actively supports and protects the conditions in which that harm occurs.
Institutions, like nervous systems, adapt to maintain stability. In a hospital setting, that often means prioritizing reputation, hierarchy, and profit over safety and truth. For a predator to operate for years, the system must suppress feedback, discredit victims, reward silence, and discourage scrutiny. It must train its staff, often covertly, to override their moral instincts in favor of institutional loyalty.
Whistleblowers are often punished or isolated. Victims are pathologized, gaslit, or ignored. Risk management becomes more about liability than harm prevention. And everyone learns: protect the doctor, protect the brand, and keep the machine running. That is institutional dysregulation, in which relationships, empathy, and accountability are subordinated to power, image, and denial.
If the hospital were organized around safety and truth, it would be impossible for such violence to continue. The fact that it does means the system is working exactly as designed: to protect itself, not the people it claims to serve.
