Introduction Workplace violence in health care settings is a significant problem world wide. The aim of this study is to identify the proportion of interns affected by all three types of violence, the study of it’s sources and consequences.

Methods This descriptive study was conducted between April and May 2017. We’ve tried to collect data from all the 100 interns that work in the university hospital of Casablanca, but only managed to get information from 60 of them. The study was done by the help of a questionnaire that included questions about sociodemographic characteristics, physical violence, verbal violence, sexual harassment and working conditions.

Results Participants were between 21 and 26 years of age. 67,8% were female. history of physical violence was found in 23,3% of the cases, the aggressor was either the patient or his family in 85,7% of the times. We found that 88,3% of the interns experienced episodes of verbal abuse, at least once every three months in 34,6% of the cases. Sexual abuse was seen in 11,7% of the cases, where 71,5% of the victims were female. Of the participants, only 58,3% said that they were encouraged to report those types of incidents.

Discussion The most frequent type of violence amongst interns was verbal in nature. Previous studies showed the same results (that verbal abuse occurs more often than physical or sexual harassment). The study shows also that patients’ companions and patients themselves do the most violence, which confirms what other studies found. Sexual harassment rate was found to be 62,5% in women in a study in Turkey which confirms what we found.

Conclusion The results of the study suggest that violence is a major problem among interns and serious measures need to be taken immediately to avoid the growing number of these incidents.