Asw. Nancy Munoz on Domestic Violence and End-of-Life Care

Steve Adubato sits down with Asw. Nancy Muñoz (R) – NJ of the 21st Legislative District to discuss two bills she sponsored to protect victims of domestic violence, and end-of-life care in New Jersey.

5/4/19 #308

 

 

 

 

Excerpt:

"Welcome to State of Affairs. I'm Steve Adubato. We're coming to you from the Agnes Varis NJTV Studio in Newark, New Jersey. It is our honor, once again, to introduce Assemblywoman Nancy Munoz, a Republican from Union County are you not? Yes. Union County. Summit, New Jersey. Summit? Summit. Yep. 21st Legislative District. A nurse by profession? Yes. The only one? The only licensed registered nurse. Thank you for clarifying that. Yeah. Yeah. You care about healthcare issues related to that? I do. I do. So one of the issues you're very involved in is the fact that you've introduced two pieces of legislation, A... we'll check this out on our website, A1711 and A1651. Two pieces of legislation creating a sexual assault victim's Bill of Rights. Explain it. Well you know it's obviously this is an important topic and we've been discussing this a lot. I was on the ad hoc committee on domestic violence and we did a lot of looking into domestic violence and this runs parallel to that, which is sexual assault, obviously we've been following the case at the hiring in the state government. Well let's clarify for a second. The Assemblywoman was on the committee... Special investig... ...investigating the... Special investigat... Well the Katie...? Yeah. Listen, let's put it out there. Yeah. Yeah. The Katie Brennan case. You can read about it. You were there? I was... You were asking questions? You were listening to testimony? Right. Right. Did that influence what you're doing here? No. this was our... no it didn't, but it supported what we were doing, which is to make sure that people... that everyone has equal access to therapy, to respect, to be believed and... by law enforcement, by the prosecutor's office, and by healthcare professionals. So what we found is that, you know, sometimes the victim will go to the police station, and they're not believed. And we have 10,000 reported sexual assaults per year in the state of New Jersey, and what we heard in testimony from this particular person, Katie Brennan, was that the police didn't actually believe her. Right. And this Bill of Rights says that you have to be believed. I mean, to... and you have to be believed, even if you don't report to the police. You need to be entitled to the same offer of services. Just because you don't go to the police it doesn't mean you shouldn't have a rape kit done, or you can't get counseling services, you can't be offered a professional... an offer to get some kind of therapy, because you know, people don't understand that trauma affects people differently. People expect that everyone reacts differently. Why do people cry at funerals..."