HJAR Sep/Oct 2024

DIALOGUE 14 SEP / OCT 2024 I  HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF ARKANSAS case, she's saying, "I think I should be going." He says, "No, it's cold outside. Just stay a little bit more." And she, "Well, I guess I'll stay a little bit longer." And then he's like, "Well, go over and put a record on while I pour." So, where's that leading to? Because he’s saying, "You go over there, do that, where your back is turned to me while I pour a drink." Then she says, "Say, what's in this drink," as she's starting to feel the effects, and he's like, "Your eyes are like star- light now." And anybody who's in a medi- cal profession knows that the eyes are very telling. When they have somebody brought into the emergency room and so forth and they're not sure what's going on with them, one of the first things that a medical pro- fessional is going to do is look in the eyes because the eyes can be very telling. He’s saying, "Your eyes are like starlight now," and she's saying, "I can't seem to break this spell," and it just keeps going back and forth. When you really start to dissect that, it does make you question if this a drug-facilitated rape scene unfolding before us. When you go back to the movie that [the song] originally came from and you first see that, the aggressor is a male versus a female victim. Then they show the same scene in an apartment down the hallway or something, and it's the opposite, where the aggressor is a female and it's now a male that's kind of being victimized. And it's comical. Again, in one scene, we're trying to romanticize it, and then in the other scene we're making it comical when he's the victim and she's the aggressor, and we're laughing about it. But these things normalize these behav- iors within our society with different mes- sages, depending on who's the aggressor and who's the victim. It still normalizes that type of behavior. Editor I asked you earlier about the definition of rape and how it’s changed. And there was a time when a married woman couldn’t be “raped” by the husband. How has that changed? What caused that shift? Wyandt-Hiebert Well, in some countries and cultures that's still the case. In the U.S., I think it's because more women are speaking up. I think part of that changed once women gained the right to vote as well and with more women taking on leadership roles and government roles and more dialogue and communication about this. At one point too, women could not own property in our country. At another point, if you got married and you did have property, it became your husband's property. A lot of those things were not all that long ago in our history when you really look back on it. So, in part, in my opinion, how does anything change in the culture? It's when we start having dialogue and people truly listen that individuals start being empathetic to what others are saying, and then laws start to change. We see this with other things, too. It's not just related to sexual violence. I often draw parallels where, for example, if you look at issues related to race, think of where we are today versus where we were just 75 years ago, when there was still segregation and outright discrimination. I'm not saying any- thing's perfect in our country. It’s not. But how do things change and continue on that path for change?Through ongoing conver- sations, recognition of what's going on, and looking at the prevalence [of problems] and talking about it. You can't change something until you start to talk about it and recognize the problem. Look at, for example, the discrimination with regard to HIV and AIDS just 25 years ago and where we are today with that. How did we get there? Well, because we started talking more about it, learning more about it, and recognizing what's going on — having those conversations. Again, I'm not saying everything's perfect yet there either, but the point is we have many parallels in our soci- ety to draw from. When it comes to address- ing sexual relationship violence, talking about it, the prevalence of it, the first step is identifying that there is a problem. You have to be able to talk about it, hear what the problem is, before you can start talking about the change that's needed. You brought up if you were married, you couldn't be raped by your spouse; but in Texas and many states, if you were a male, you could not be raped — sexual assault, but not rape. Sexual assault often carries a lesser charge from a legal standpoint, but a lot of those laws have changed as well now, state by state. Editor In the Arkansas State Police list of crimes, it lists forcible rape. Wyandt-Hiebert I'm not an attorney, so I'm not going to give you a technical definition here, but the way we talk about it, in general terms, is that forcible compulsion either means by the threat of force or the implied threat or force. So, with forcible compulsion, one of the analogies I often draw is if you're a bank teller and somebody comes in waving a gun in your face, well, it's direct, right there, forcible compulsion. You're going to give me this money, here's this gun waving in your face. Implied forcible compulsion would be when you're a bank teller, somebody comes in with their hoodie on, and they have their hand with a gun or a banana or whatever, in their pocket. You don't see it, but it's pointing at you. It's implied there's a gun there. When it comes to sexual violence under that particular aspect, there are different ways that sexual violence is committed. In the state of Arkansas, there are four. Two of them have to do with age, one is by forc- ible compulsion, the other is by sex with somebody who's temporarily or perma- nently incapable of giving consent because of physical or mental incapacity. That's where alcohol and other substances come into place, making [someone] temporar- ily incapable of consent; or maybe some- body has a disability that impedes them from being able to give full consent. With forcible compulsion, there is actual direct force or implied threat, potentially a gun. An individual I worked with was threatened that if she didn't have sex with that indi- vidual, they knew where her kindergarten