He grabbed my arm with painful, steel-grip fingers, glared into my eyes and growled, "I'm gonna get my piece of meat into you".

It was the night shift. I was a recent graduate nurse and had to attend to him over and over again that night. Every time I approached, he gripped my arm, yanked me towards him and said, "I'm gonna get my piece of meat into you", in that dark, gravelly voice.

His adult daughter was asleep on a chair beside him; when she was awake, she reached over to pat his arm and say, "There, there, Dad". Her presence didn't make things better. It made them worse. I felt like I had to protect her from his behaviour. To stay quiet. To be professional. To reassure her that it was just the illness and it wasn't impacting me. Oh no. I was fine. I was doing my job. This was my job.

When I went home in the early dawn, the physical imprint left by his fingers digging into my arms echoed the deeper imprint his words had dug inside me. I still remember tiny details from that night: the line of dirt under his nails, the acidic smell of a patient who's difficult to wash, the shift and rattle of the bedrails. I have flashbacks when I walk past that room.

It made me feel sick and small. But I never called it sexual assault.

Neither did my supervisors: "Oh, yes, he's just like that..."

"Better to just ignore it."

"It's not personal, you know."

Years later, when the #MeToo movement crashed into my feed, I still didn't identify what happened that night as sexual assault.

I didn't even stop to think of my workplace.

It wasn't until my cousin Brooke talked to me that I started to name it.

As a nurse who has worked for 13 years in hospitals I firmly believe in respectful, non-judgemental, patient-centred care. ( Pexels )

I was furious to the core

When Brooke was a newborn, I was 13 years old and I held her in my arms. When she was 10 I tutored her in maths, plaited her hair and told her about my nursing studies. I was so inspired by what I was learning, the difference I could make in people's lives. When she grew up, Brooke followed in my footsteps, not only to share my career, but also here, to my city, 4000 kilometres from our family. Now we work in the same hospital.

In the months after #MeToo broke, we were driving back from an afternoon at the beach. Car full of friends in the early dusk, tall pine trees shadowing the road, me behind the wheel.

She told us this story: she'd been caring for an elderly male patient in intensive care. Because he was off the monitor, she needed to supervise him in the shower. It was for his safety, she said, in case something happened. His response?

"Oh, you just want to blow me a wet one, don't you?" Shocked and disgusted, Brooke could only muster a "no".

Sexual assault support services: 1800 RESPECT: 1800 737 732

1800 RESPECT: Lifeline: 131 114

Lifeline: Beyond Blue: 1300 224 636

Despite her feelings she continued to give him the care he required. And she didn't report it to the in-charge nurse.

The protective instinct rose in me like a roar.

Then this story: a patient had said to Brooke, "I bet you don't like to be touched or caressed at all, do you?" This was followed by explicit details about his sexual relationship with his partner. Brooke felt deeply uncomfortable. When she told her in-charge nurse, her response was, "Did he grope you? No? Well, then, how is that being inappropriate?"

I was gut-punched and furious to the core. I had a sudden sense of clarity. My little cousin had been sexually harassed. And it had not been dealt with properly.

Nursing life is rife with abuse

I recognised that I, too, had been sexually assaulted by a patient. In fact, I realised nursing work is rife with it. I started to talk with my colleagues. I felt that, by naming it, I was breaking an unspoken code.

One of my colleagues agreed. "Yes," she said, "everyone has a story, multiple stories. But they won't call it sexual harassment. Instead they'll say, 'Oh, they have x/y/z condition, don't take it personally'. Or maybe at best, they'll request a male nurse."

In this predominantly female workforce (more than 90 per cent of Australian nurses are female), there is an insidious culture, an unspoken expectation that we will quietly put up with being treated this way.

We brush things off. We take a joke. We certainly don't argue with patients.

We keep the peace and provide patient-centred care. It means we don't identify the sexual violence directed at us.

We don't deal with how it affects us.

Sorry, this video has expired 'Young people are primary targets of sexual harassment at work,' says Kate Jenkins

From a young nurse's diary

I work as a nurse educator now, running regular sexual health and diversity workshops with health professionals. We discuss why it's important for us to talk about patients' sexual health. During a recent workshop, one nurse, Nikita, put up her hand. "What about when a patient talks about sex with you, but inappropriately?"

It was a red beacon for me. Something had happened to Nikita — a junior nurse who had barely been on the wards for a year — that she wasn't trained to deal with. I asked the group, "Has anyone else in the room had an experience like that?"

There were more than 30 health professionals in the room and almost everyone put up their hand.

Afterwards I approached Nikita, saying I wanted to do more and could she write her story down?

"I've got a diary entry," she said. "Do you want me to give you that?"

Later, she handed me photocopied hand-written pages. She'd written the minutia of the ward, details of staff and logistics, and a nice-looking male patient in his 70s making inappropriate comments but needing to be showered:

"I was washing him and getting him to wash where he could and he started with the inappropriate comments again — saying how pretty I am and how he wanted me to touch him personally and that he wanted to shower me next — to which I explained that that was inappropriate and not why I was here. I ignored it, just trying to focus on the job at hand. Without warning he stood up and I freaked out as I thought he was going to fall and I stepped in front of him and held his shoulders and told him to sit back down so that he didn't fall. That's when he grabbed my lower back and was holding his hands on my bum and legs trying to pull himself onto me — saying, 'I want to feel your body on mine' and telling me to touch him. I put force on his shoulders and firmly told him to sit down again and he did. I was shaky with shock and just told him not to do that again, turned off the water, dried him quickly, changed him into a gown, underwear, socks, dried the floor and walked him back to bed."

Nikita worked until the end of her shift before reporting the incident. The in-charge nurse responded quite supportively. She asked a doctor to speak to the patient and organised Nikita a counselling appointment and a taxi voucher home.

Nikita talked about how the nurse, the doctor and the counsellor put the onus back on her. They all asked, "Why didn't you press the emergency button?", "Why didn't you call for help?"

The phone counsellor was particularly bad.

"I spoke to an older male psychologist who didn't talk to me about what happened … I feel like once I told him what happened he didn't know what to say … also said, 'Oh, if he had dementia, well then …' and made out like that was a good excuse. He also said, 'Why didn't you push the emergency button and call for help?' I explained I was in a closed room in the corner and the button was out of reach and if I had stepped away from the patient he would have fallen. After that call I felt worse than before."

The hospital bed can be a place where men feel they need to reclaim power. ( Pexels: rawpixel.com )

Bad behaviour is not about a patient's condition

A 1993 study in Ontario showed that more than 75 per cent of female physicians reported being sexually harassed by patients. Now take away the status of "doctor" and add a series of both deeply intimate and ostensibly menial tasks, and imagine how the statistic might rise.

Yes, some (but not all!) perpetrators have a disinhibiting condition that might explain their behaviour. But they mostly don't behave the same way in the presence of male doctors or nurses. It's much more likely to happen when the curtains are pulled, or in the bathroom, or when there are no other staff nearby. Which is often.

Despite their condition, these men know how to pick their moment. Part of them still knows when a woman is alone. And it's very rare to hear of female patients with similar conditions sexually harassing people.

This behaviour is not about their condition. It's about a long-entrenched culture of men believing that women's purpose is to provide for their needs, including their sexual needs, whether or not they are interested. It is about men feeling that they can use sex to assert their power.

Because the hospital bed can be a place where men feel they need to reclaim power.

As a nurse who has worked for 13 years in hospitals I firmly believe in respectful, non-judgemental, patient-centred care. This belief drives how I operate at work on a daily basis. These men, some of whom are very ill, deserve high-quality care. They deserve to be treated with respect.

But the women who care for them also deserve respect. We deserve systems in place to protect us while we do our job.

Hospital work can be quite isolated with nurses left on their own away from other staff members. ( Unsplash: Daan Stevens )

I had a sinking feeling, it had happened again

Sophia was another of my junior nurses and recently I spent some hours working with her, laughing with a patient who had been trampled by a cow and chatting to another who had been recently released from prison.

Just after her break she said, "I want to talk to you about some really awful sexual harassment stuff that happened to me the other day." As she started to tell me the story, I had a sinking feeling of familiarity. This. Again. We needed to report it.

We were standing at the nurses' station. It's not the ideal place to write about your sexual harassment. But I opened a Word doc, pulled up a chair, and asked Sophia to write everything down.

Sophia had been targeted by a patient for a whole shift. Each time she returned to him his comments continued: "It's lonely down here without you, you know", "Can you give me a cuddle?", "Can you get into bed with me?", "Just make sure you come in often so I can look at you", "When you come behind the curtain, can you remove some clothing?" Sophia told him to stop, that his behaviour wasn't appropriate. He didn't stop.

When she needed to roll him over he tried to grab her hips.

Sophia went to the in-charge nurse, who replied that it wasn't a new issue. The patient had been sexually inappropriate to other nurses. Sophia hadn't been warned.

And it wasn't just the patient. His father, who was capable of caring for some of his basic needs, asked Sophia to do them instead: "He just wanted you to do it," he'd said, looking her up and down. "A hot young thing like you, I can see why".

She'd finished with the Word document, and I joined her to help log the incident online. The drop-down menus kept failing to drop down and then the whole thing crashed three or four times. I gave up and instead forwarded Sophia's words in an email to the Director of Nursing (the DoN). The DoN, a white-haired woman in her 60s, has worked her way up, through years of nursing, to this leadership role in a big hospital.

I wasn't working the next day, but Sophia told me what happened. The DoN came to see her on the ward to explain how she was responding. The DoN went to speak with the patient, asking a senior male registrar to join her to make it clear that this wasn't just "women's business".

The registrar didn't think a conversation would be useful. "It's his delirium," he said.

But the DoN was firm, pointing to Sophia's story. "I want you to read this again, very slowly and carefully, and then tell me it was just delirium."

The registrar agreed to speak with the patient. After that, the inappropriate behaviour stopped. Entirely. This intervention had been effective.

It's just not part of our job

Sophia told me one other thing about that conversation. She said the DoN had apologised to her personally. Apologised not only that this had happened, but for her generation. For accepting decades of the behaviour, taking it on the chin, and not interrupting the culture of sexual harassment sooner.

#MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement, published by Picador ( supplied )

"My generation has a lot to answer for," she said.

Part of me was furious that here was another woman, apologising for the way men have treated her. And part of me felt a wave of teary relief. Someone in a position of power was responding. We were going to fix this. We deserve our experiences to be acknowledged.

Brooke, Nikita, Sophia, I am so deeply sorry that this was done to you. You responded with professionalism and dignity. But those feelings you told me about — your disgust, your fear, those shrivelling, icky, powerless feelings — there's a real reason for them. Let's start calling it by name.

Australian nurses are being sexually harassed by our patients. And it's not part of our job.

The names in this piece have been changed to protect privacy. If you have experienced sexual harassment or assault you can phone 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or Lifeline on 131 114.

Simone Sheridan is a nurse educator in the public health sector. Ailsa Wild is a writer. This is an edited extract from #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement, published by Picador, available from today.