More than half of all nurses polled report suffering at least one incident of physical or psychological violence in a single year, according to research by a health union grouping.
And 80 percent of nurses questioned blamed abuse - largely by male doctors - in the private sector for nurses leaving the profession.
Almost half the respondents - 48 percent - of respondents cited abuse by patients as a reason for nurses leaving the profession.
The study was conducted by Christine Zondagh, of the Health and Other Service Personnel Trade Unions of South Africa (Hospersa), and published in the newly released Health Annals 2005 of the Hospital Association of South Africa.
In an article, Sharon Slabbert, the Hospital Association's client liaison executive officer, said that while nurses working in accident and emergency units were commonly exposed to a "disturbing number of assault victims", violence against the nurses themselves was neither widely discussed nor acknowledged.
Employers, Slabbert wrote, usually stated that incidents of violence against nurses were rare, but the opposite was true.
The violence ranged from harassment and bullying to aggression and assault, both physical and psychological.
The perpetrators were patients, patients' families and visitors, other nurses and other healthcare professionals, such as doctors.
Racial and sexual harassment were also reported.
The Hospersa research was conducted in conjunction with Dr Susan Steinman, founder of the Work Trauma Foundation.
Slabbert wrote that it had shown that staff in health services were 16 times more likely to be the victims of violence than the average.
Psychological violence was the more likely kind, involving healthcare workers, and physical violence was usually perpetrated by patients and their relatives.
Quoting Zondagh's study of why professional nurses leave the profession, Slabbert said 80 percent of those surveyed suggested that abuse, largely by male doctors towards female nurses in the private sector specially, could be the reason.
Slabbert pointed out that the increase in violence against nurses in the British National Health Service was also well documented.
In six months of 2003, more than 400 cases of violence and aggression against healthcare workers at the Bradford Royal Infirmary were reported, and nearly 140 incidents by Airedale General Hospital staff.
The Massachusetts Nurses' Association in the United States reported that in 2002 more than 4 000 hospital employees were assaulted while working in accident and emergency units.
Slabbert quoted the US Department of Justice as saying nurses experienced violence and victimisation rates 72 percent higher than medical technicians, and twice that suffered by other health workers.
Nurses who were regularly subjected to verbal abuse, she said, experienced more stress, felt less job satisfaction and could take more days off work, so providing substandard care.
The areas she pinpointed in which abuse occurred most often included general wards, intensive care units and emergency departments - with emergency staff, unsurprisingly, taking the brunt of it.
"Although nurses are committed to caring for their patients and their families, this does not include accepting abusive or violent behaviour," Slabbert said.
In addition, unless an actual "assault" occurred, the violence was often ignored, in spite of research having shown that a tolerance of "less aggressive" violence often resulted in worse acts of violence.
"The only way to eradicate this problem is through a policy of zero tolerance," she said.