ABSTRACT
Drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) charted its earliest territory in public awareness with the unsuspecting victim who was exploited in a business or professional setting and was clearly divorced from any sexual context. The earliest notorious cases of sexual exploitation through drugs and alcohol involved supervisors and employees, or doctors and patients. Variations within modus operandi reflect the perpetrator’s occupation, social skills, and the setting. Perpetrators invariably use creativity and cunning to prevent the crime’s discovery and DFSA is intended to be an opportunistic, nonconfrontational crime, no matter the setting. Physicians and paraprofessionals have also been implicated in drug-facilitated sexual crimes in distinctive, if familiar, fact patterns. Crimes involving doctors and dentists have characteristically taken place in private offices where the perpetrator/health care provider was in charge of the premises. In these cases, perpetrators sedate and sexually assault patients while treating them. Such offenders may act professionally with most of their patients but carefully select others to victimize.
