HJAR Nov/Dec 2024

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS I  NOV / DEC 2024 21 from Regina's perspective. That's why this was so important to me. When I see howwe try to protect adults who have inflicted dire situations on children whose lives will never be the same — I don't care what happened, their life will never be the same — and then give the adults an excuse, that is what really forced me to actually move to something that some considered drastic measures. I was like, “We keep doing the same thing expecting different results and that is not going to happen”; and people were saying, “Oh, you can't do this, you can't do that. It really is not going to curtail crime. It's not going to stop those perpetrators because it's about power.”I said, “It will to some degree, because they're not going to be able to inflict the level of hurt that they're doing to this child today.” And in addition to that, “How are you taking up for them? What about the child whose life will never be the same and the mental anguish that they go through? And if they don't have a good support system at home, then that thing becomes multiplied by many things that happen — getting into abusive relationships looking for love, using drugs … the list can go on and on. What about their lives?” I believe that physicians should, and most of them do, have this automatic training of knowing when something is wrong and then being able to, if they don't have the special- ized area, refer the children to individuals who do. Editor The majority of our children in Louisiana are on Medicaid. Do you think there's enough time in a typical doctor's appointment for this uncovering to happen? Sen. Barrow My truthful answer is no. Fifteen minutes to rush in — if it's 15, but I think that's the allotted time — is not enough, especially if you don't have a relationship. If you have a relationship with that patient, then I think that physician can immediately tell. I have met some wonderful physicians in this arena who can tell, and I know that they really care. Then, you have those who just “do their job.” They come in, ask the questions that they typically ask: “Is anything going on,” or, “Do you feel like killing yourself?” The child says, “No,” and they're just like, “Oh, OK,” and they walk out the room. We don't do enough frommy perspective, able to ask questions through a counselor or S.A.N.E nurse with an earpiece, so the kid doesn't have to tell the story over and over and over again. It has such dire consequences on both the long- and short-term mental health of that child. Sen. Barrow That's right. Editor Y ou have the ear of the healthcare industry right now. What should a healthcare provider look for specifically about sexual abuse that might happen to a child? You can pretty much, I think, tell if a girl has been raped, but you might not have the DNA to prove who did it if it happens earlier. Are there tells? Sen. Barrow I think that there are, but one of the things that I think is really important is the level of relationship that you have with the physician. If a child sees their physician often, they should be able to pick up immediately if there are withdrawal symptoms — if that child was bubbly before and now, all of a sudden, they are very quiet. I think that's one part of it in terms of the level of relationship that the physician has with the patient. On the clinical side, in questioning them — eye contact, watching body language — I think physicians are trained with certain things that they already should know auto- matically to say, “Something has happened here. Let me go a little further. Let me go a little deeper to find out what has happened.” In some instances, some trauma is so horrific that it's buried. The mind is so amaz- ing to me, in terms of how it protects itself. So, it would take a series of things some- times to uncover, depending on who it is, and most of the time, it's people that they know — family members or neighbors or someone they trust, someone the family trusts — that has committed this who then ultimately either threatens them or talks about what's going to happen if they tell. This level of trauma causes a person to go into a very secluded place. “Oftentimes, children donʼt have the voice to articulate what is happening to them, and ... those individuals who commit these crimes often commit them over and over again until they are caught.”