Suicidal Risk Assessment in Victims of Sexual Assault Referred to Isfahan Legal Medicine Center

Introduction: Suicide is the deliberate act of self-destruction that in the best sense can be regarded as a multidimensional discomfort in a needy person and it is affected by many risk factors. Rape means sexual intercourse with a person without their consent. Rape is not only a physical and sexual assault, but also has profound psychological damage and can sometimes lead to the victim s suicide. Since this issue has not been investigated in Iran so far, in this study we aimed to investigate the risk of suicide in rape victims. Methods: This is a cross sectional survey which was done in Isfahan legal medicine center from April 2017 to April 2018. The inclusion criteria were 15 year old and above female victims who were able to cooperate and consent to complete the Beck scale for suicidal ideation (BSS). After Simple randomized sampling and considering sample size calculation formula the number of people required to do this project is 64 people. Then a questionnaire including demographic characteristics, job status, age, marital status, educational level, severity of genitalia damage and other parts of the body, number of aggressors ,whether the aggressor was anonymous or not was given to patients.it also contains 19 questions on death thinking, suicide thoughts, and suicide planning based on the BSS. Based on a score of 38 points patients were divided into 3 groups: low risk (0-12 points), moderate risk (13-25 points), and high risk (26-38 points). The validity and reliability of this questionnaire has been proven in previous international studies and also in our country is used. X2 and Multiple Logistic Regression tests in Statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) version 20 were used for data analysis and compare the results. P-value less than 0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results: The result of this study showed that the Mean ± SD of patients’ age was 23.97. Suicide history (P<0.001), psychology history (P=0.037), the familiarity of the attacker (P= 0.039), and perineum-damaged victims (P= 0.022) were the underlying factors which significantly impress the severity of suicide danger in rape victims. Conclusion: Despite the fact that the results of the other indexes were not statistically significant, prevalence of them in high risk group was high. Due to this fact, women awareness to reduce danger is of high importance.

کلیدواژه ها:

suicide ، rape ، victim ، women