Category Archives: violence

Hate Crimes against PWD

The FBI recently released the 2008 Hate Crimes Statistics report, summarizing hate crime data from over 13,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. The Attorney General is required to compile and report on this data yearly. Although the majority of hate crimes are based on race, it includes reporting on crimes “motivated by disability bias,” which made up 1 percent of the reported incidents.

Of the total 9,168 hate crime offenses in the report, 85 were on the basis of disability: 28 against a person with a physical disability and 57 against a person with a mental disability. The most common offenses were “Simple assault” and “Intimidation,” with a number of “Vandalism” incidents also. The vast majority of incidents took place in the victim’s residence or home. This mirrors the overall data – the majority of all hate crimes regardless of basis were assaults and intimidation taking place in or near the victim’s residence or home.

What is most clear from the report is that the majority of crimes committed against people with disabilities are not considered or categorized as hate crimes on the basis of disability. The US Department of Justice released a 2007 report on crime against people with disabilities finding that in one year, approximately 716,000 nonfatal violent crimes and 2.3 million property crimes were committed against people with disabilities. Even considering that only one in five PWD crime victims “believed that they became a victims because of their disability,” these numbers are an order of magnitude larger that then total crimes against PWD listed in the hate crime statistics.

Whether crimes against people with disabilities should be considered hate crimes is a difficult and complicated question. One on hand, the DOJ report demonstrates that the rate of nonfatal violent crimes against PWD was 1.5 higher than the rate for TABs, with the rate of crimes against women with disabilities almost twice the rate for TAB women. It is hard to imagine that disparities this significant are unrelated to disability status.

At the same time, I am concerned about giving more power to the criminal justice system. I read a compelling piece at The Bilerico Project recently which, while focus on trans issues, seems relevant to this discussion:

No one can deny that particular groups are in fact treated with discrimination and even violence. But rather than ask how about how to combat such discrimination and violence, we’ve taken the easy route out and decided to hand over the solution to a prison industrial complex that already benefits massively from the incarceration of mostly poor people and mostly people of color. It’s also worth considering the class dynamics of hate crimes legislation, given that the system of law and order is already skewed against those without the resources to combat unfair and overly punitive punishment and incarceration.

What do you think – should crimes against PWDs? be punished as hate crimes? Is that an effective way to address and prevent continued crimes against PWDs?

“Cast Offs” – A Warning for Rape-threat Content

Cast Offs is a new British TV show. This scripted fake-reality show aims to spoof Survivor-type shows by placing six people with different disabilities (all physical or sensory) on an island. All are played by actors with a disability. The show also shows a series of flashbacks, with each episode focusing on one of the characters’ lives.

This isn’t a full review of the pilot, except to say that I’m not all that convinced that having PWD sledging each other for having a disability, Crips Behaving Badly-style, is all that much of an improvement over having temporarily-abled people sledging PWD. Self-deprecating and collaborative humour I’m all about; pitting PWDs against each other in snide and nasty ways, not so much. As usual, the show claims that it’s terribly adventurous and new, and that it’s all about “satire” and “the last taboo”. Who is being “satirised” and why here?

The point of this post is mainly to warn you about a scene near the beginning, if you are thinking of watching, but you’re triggered by sexual violence and threats of rape. The scene occurs without any warning or inkling of the turn the content is about to take.

Description and clip below the cut. **Trigger warnings apply.**

Continue reading “Cast Offs” – A Warning for Rape-threat Content

I’d Rather Be Dead

I didn’t think I’d need to do this but it has come up: This post is not a place to discuss the merits of assisted suicide. Many disabled people, including me, find it really unsettling. In the context of able-bodied and neurotypical people telling us our lives aren’t worth living it is especially inappropriate. Comments on the subject will not be published.

Warning: The following includes graphic descriptions of medical unpleasantries.

I could never live like you. I’d rather be dead. You’re so strong. You’re so brave. How do you do it?

I have a chronic pain condition. Most of the time I don’t bother getting into detail because I don’t feel like it but it’s illustrative here, so I’ll share. I live in pain. It pools in my hips and my left knee and my right shoulder and sometimes my legs turn to stone. Every step I walk hurts and I keep getting slower and more labored. (My disability is invisible only in the most technical sense. Fortunately people have lots of practice not seeing disability! So, phew.) Sometimes, like the other night, my hands hurt so much I can’t get the non-child-resistant easy-open top off the bottle of pain meds.

(If my hands hurt so much why do I type? Why not use a voice writer? Because this voice here, this is the voice I write with. This is not the voice I speak with. I would write far less if I had to use my voice to do it. And it’s only pain.)

And then there’s the Weird Shit. (It’s a technical term.) I take antibiotics daily because if I don’t I get a urinary tract infection which leaves me crumpled in the bathtub screaming, gushing blood, graying out, waiting for the big antibiotics to get working. Sure I could go to the emergency room and I have — where they give me the same antibiotics I’d get from calling my urologist’s answering service and pain meds weaker than what I take daily. And I get to deal with having medical professionals react to me being trans* and poor.

A sore throat once turned out to be a fungal infection, another one was a tonsillary abscess, the treatment for which was getting stabbed with a large-bore needle then having the contents of the abcess squished out. It was about as comfortable as it sounds, and it tasted every bit as good. I did not bite the nurse practitioner who was treating me. My general practitioner later looked at me really weird when I expressed concern that my next sore throat (it was just a virus and a runny nose) might be one of these until I explained that I’d actually had these things.

The big one was when a cold — in the space of three weeks — became bronchitis, then pneumonia. If I rolled onto my right side, I felt like I was drowning. If I sat up, I felt dizzy. A chest x-ray showed much of my left lung was wrong. I was admitted to hospital that day, the five doctors that came that night took my wife into the hall and told her the things that could be killing me. There was fluid in the space around my lung. They poked at me and stuck a needle in and drew off three hundred millilitres. I didn’t get appreciably better. They installed a peripherally introduced central catheter so they could give me vein-killing antibiotics like vancomycin and aureomycin. The fluid they’d drawn off, cultured, proved to be sterile. More chest x-rays showed shadowy bits around my heart and more imaging showed fluid buildup there too — between having a lung and a third to breathe with and a heart working under the increased burden, I was understandably tired. Even more understandably when some time during the week I was in hospital, my red blood cell count fell through the floor. They were tracking everything that came out of me so it wasn’t like the blood was going anywhere, it just… vanished. They gave me more blood. Later they got the bright idea of drawing off the fluid around my lung at least and took me down to radiological medicine. I got to sit up for it. They did throw in some lidocaine, which at the time I hadn’t figured out that I could say “Hey I don’t metabolize this like most people I need more time for it to take effect before you start stabbing me with shit” so the ginormous fucking needle they stabbed me in the back with? I felt most of that. Ow. I wasn’t supposed to see it (mustn’t discomfit the patient, even if she finds things comforting that most people don’t), but I got a look at the three-litre vacuum bottle half full of murky green fluid they’d sucked out of me. I felt much better, though that lung felt crinkly like cellophane from having been collapsed so long. It was a teaching hospital, so the place was crawling with med students who all (I heard — the nurses wouldn’t actually let them come near my room for which I am still grateful) made excuses to come read my chart. I was medically interesting. I never did get a diagnosis. A real diagnosis, I mean. I know full well that ‘idiopathic pericarditis’ means ‘the membrane around your heart is inflamed and we don’t know why.’

On a fun side note, while I was in hospital busy being sick with Weird Shit I kept getting calls from work. I was the only person in the company who knew how to do what I did, so I provided user support. From my hospital bed. On morphine, with blood running into my arm. It was kind of impressive, in an appalling way. When I was home (I was out of work almost two months and none of it was remotely vacational — at some point I’ll write about having had a whole week of vacation in the ten years since my diagnosis with this chronic pain condition) they sent someone to bring me a computer so I could do some things, occasionally.

I’ll stop with the Ways Kaninchen Zero Is Very Very Ill now. The point is yeah, there’s a lot going on. Most of us could tell similar stories, or scarier ones.

I cry, often. Even with the meds I’m in a lot of pain all the time. I’m exhausted, all the time. I work thirty to forty hours a week in spite of it (though I’m running up against the limits of that too).

People who don’t live with chronic pain wonder how I do this. How do I live with this much pain? How do I keep going? How have I done this since I was a teenager? (I’m thirty-seven now.) I must be a fucking paragon of moral fortitude, because (I’m told) I’m not even all that bitter about it (though I am, sometimes). I’m happy, when I can get around the depression I’ve carried most of my life too.

I could never live like you. I’d rather be dead. You’re so strong. You’re so brave. How do you do it?

I hear this a lot. It’s actually not a secret, though I think the able-bodied are somewhat afraid of the answers. It’s not even difficult. Most anyone could live my life, probably. I have a good life. My doctors listen to me when I tell them what’s going on with me which is wonderful after so many years of being told I wasn’t in pain because the tests didn’t show anything. I have books, games, computers. Because of the last I have friends and I fall in love about five times a year. (I’ve been working on doing things that scare me and I’m telling people more that I’m infatuated, crushing, in love. And that they don’t have to feel the same way about me at all.) Sometimes I can actually stop writing a story and call it finished.[1]

Here’s how I do it: I want to live. I don’t want to be dead. My life is worth living. It’s not tragic. It’s easy. We’ve all got the means to get acclimated to a new home, new furniture, changes in climate and environment. Having a different bodily environment or neurological environment is just something else to get used to.

The commenters in the Why Are They So Angry At Her? thread have it right, I think. The physio/neurotypical haven’t bothered to consider our lives from any perspective but their own and all they see are limits. They imagine being ill with the flu (which leaves me in bed and miserable and hating it too), or an injury that hurt and impaired their movement but ultimately healed: a sprained joint, a broken bone. (All of which I’ve done also: counting the events where more than one bone broke at a time as one, I’ve broken bones more than ten times though I’m a little fuzzy on exactly how many — broken toes are hard to track.) They recall how miserable being ill or injured was and imagine having a disability (or several) as being ill or injured and thus miserable all the time.

We’re not. Even when depression is part of a constellation of symptoms or a side effect of meds or just something else to live with, we’re not. We’re just living, like everyone. When we hear “I’d rather be dead” it often sounds like “you should be dead.” And with good reason. People with disabilities are killed by those who should care for them. Parents kill their disabled children and the public’s sympathy is with the murderers. Caregivers in institutional facilities kill residents and few people care.

Amanda has written extensively about this at Ballastexistenz, and her Background, to the Foreground post is excellent. Not Dead Yet is dedicated to working against euthanasia and assisted suicide policies that make killing us legal, or at least fuzzy. Lauredhel’s post at Hoyden About Town about Christian Rossiter’s lawsuit to refuse nutrition hits most of the points I try to make when I talk about this issue. It’s despair and isolation that drive us to want to die. The neuro/physiotypical don’t see that part of it.

There are social feedback loops that reinforce these attitudes and keep us isolated. Ignorance and fear and hate go together. Neuro/physiotypical friends and relatives stop inviting us to things after a while. We’ve said we can’t come a number of times: we weren’t up to it for whatever reason that day, the venue wasn’t accessible, we didn’t have transportation. Eventually it becomes habit, justified by unhelpful concern. Whatever place isn’t accessible (it’s too much bother to plan for real utility). Oh, they probably won’t feel up to it (our lives are miseries anyway). Around it goes.

[1] Some of my stories can be found at my story blog, though be warned: nearly all of them involve themes of sex, violence, death, horror.

Fort Hood Shootings

As you may have heard, this afternoon at Fort Hood in Texas, a shooter killed 12 and wounded 31 people. The shooter, Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was killed during the incident.

While this is not a breaking news blog, my initial reaction was fear that the shooter had or could be construed to have had a mental disability that would be seen as the basis of the attack. And because emotions run high after this kind of disaster and people feel protective, there can be some nasty and hurtful rhetoric flying around. (I have already seen some vile and awful things said about his potential Muslim heritage. Needless to say, none of that will be tolerated in comments.) We wanted to create this as an open thread, safe space kind of area to discuss any concerns or thoughts raised by this incident.

Here’s a few resources I’ve seen, more will undoubtedly develop as the story progresses:

  • If you are concerned about specific individuals in the area, check the Red Cross Safe and Well List for more information.
  • Local blood donations are being accepted at Scott and White Memorial Hospital, 2401 S 31st St, Temple, TX?. They will be open until 10pm local time today and re-open at 8am tomorrow. ETA: The hospital has closed to donations for the day due to overwhelming response – please try them again tomorrow.
  • To find other locations to give blood, check the Red Cross website. Even if you live nowhere near Texas, consider donating blood (if it is healthy for you to do so) to prepare for future disasters.

Our warm thoughts and hope for speedy recovery go out to those affected by the shooting and their friends and families.

Focusing on College Students’ Mental Health (For the Benefit of the Neurotypical)

I live in Los Angeles and the local papers have been abuzz about the recent stabbing of a UCLA student by another student during science lab. Apparently a professor reported concerns about the alleged attacker’s mental health about 10 months ago. And so, according to the LA Times:

The recent arrest of a UCLA student in the brutal stabbing of a classmate in a campus chemistry lab has again focused attention on an issue that gripped the nation after the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech: the mental health of troubled college students. The Virginia Tech shootings, which left 32 victims and the gunman dead, raised difficult questions about how a disturbed student could have been allowed to remain at the school despite danger signs. The Virginia Tech killings were followed last year by a deadly attack at Northern Illinois University, in which a former graduate student killed five students and himself.

So – to be clear – the focus on students’ mental health has the primary goal of identifying students who are at risk of violent attacks on other students and staff. And presumably treating or confining them. While protecting the safety of students and staff is unequivocally something that a school should be doing, characterizing that goal as “focusing on college students’ mental health” ignores violent crimes against staff or students committed by people without mental illness. It also does a vast disservice to the vast majority of students with mental illness who are at zero risk for committing premeditated violent crimes.

The US Department of Justice estimates that there are 34,000 violent crimes committed against college students on college campuses every year. Most of those were non-fatal, there were 20 on-campus murders in 2000 (there were about 1800 rapes in the same year). While it’s likely that some of those violent crimes were committed by a student with a mental disability, the vast majority of them were not. It’s certainly more likely that a college student who is a victim of violent crime is affected by one of these “garden variety” crimes than something like the incidents in the article – of which there have only been 3 since 2007.

Additionally, the message that focusing on mental health is solely to prevent these incidents marginalizes and harms college students with mental illness who aren’t ever going to kill or physically attack anybody, much less bring a gun to class and start shooting randomly. Those students are being told that people with mental illness are scary and dangerous and need to be found right away so they can be kept away from other students.

Many colleges now require a mental health assessment for a troubled student to stay enrolled and more readily expel those who refuse to comply, said Brian Van Brunt, president-elect of the American College Counseling Assn. who heads the counseling center at Western Kentucky University.

There are a whole lot of things wrong with this. First, it’s very unclear who will be subject to this kind of review – who counts as a “troubled student”? Once a student is required to undergo this review, they’re required to subject to a psych assessment and disclose past traumas, sexual assaults, all kinds of things to the college administration, at the threat of expulsion. And the implication is that if the college doesn’t like the outcome of the mental health assessment, the student might be expelled on the basis of their mental health status.

This gives students a huge incentive to stay quiet about their mental health concerns, to hide them. Going to student health for psych counseling might trigger a review by the administration to see if a student was too sick to be at school. Talking to an RA might result in a report to student services. Even fellow students might report you to be psychologically reviewed by the administration. And it’s not at all clear the colleges are that enthusiastic about keeping these students around:

Colleges try to retain students if they are not violent, said Keith Anderson, chairman of the American College Health Assn.’s best practices task force in mental health. “The goal is to keep them in school, keep them functioning and engaged, and in treatment at the same time,” said Anderson, who is a staff psychologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Tory, N.Y

“Try to retain students if they are not violent” is a far cry from “affirmatively and eagerly addresses the mental health needs of students.” It sounds an awful lot like “will tolerate those students, I guess.” And that message is having an effect:

In a recent survey of campus health officials, the American College Counseling Assn. report noted “growing intolerance by faculty and others about students perceived to be odd.”

“Maybe if we shun the weirdos, they’ll leave before we have to expel them!” It’s clear that this focus on mental health is not at all for the benefit of those college students with mental illness – it will affirmatively interfere with their ability to get support and treatment. It will make things worse for them. So the only motivation for this increased focus on mental health is to protect the neurotypical from the violent attacks from individuals with mental illness, who are considered universally dangerous and deserving of suspicion. This new focus is for the comfort of the neurotypical, at the direct expense of students with mental illness.

What does it mean to heal?

Perhaps this is the wrong question. Instead, I propose: What is there to heal?

Healing is the process of a body, having been injured in some way, doing what it takes to restore itself to normalcy. Merriam-Webster says, specifically, “to make sound or whole” and “to restore to original purity or integrity.”

Take note of the words I have highlighted. What are they saying?

This cultural idea of healing, applied to a person’s spirit rather than body, draws upon the idea of an abnormal body being made “normal.” It assumes that any person not normal should be made normal.

But there are all sorts of bodies in this world. Bodies with broken bones, broken skin, disfigured limbs, faces, with cuts and gashes and wounds, missing limbs, missing organs, organs which work in abnormal ways — according to our cultural norms.

And, much the same, there are all sorts of people in this world. People who have survived assault and abuse, been subject to violence, faced trauma, been manipulated or neglected, dealt with addictions, lost loved ones. People who have experienced any number of things which cause them significant distress.

These people are expected to “heal” from their experience. They go through a modest amount of time processing the event emotionally and then return to normal.

But why should they be made normal?

Why should any broken person be pushed and pressured into a form which does not fit?

Why is it that a person who is anything other than normal is therefore less than whole?

Why can’t a person simply be who they are, even if they are injured or broken or disfigured, and still be considered a whole person?

Any person who has faced trauma will need to find ways to process their trauma, ways to cope, ways to live with what has changed in their life. But that person should not have to push hirself to go back to how things once were — or to make things resemble what they are for a person who has not faced that trauma. Things may be different. There is not only one way to live a life. There are many. And perhaps you will settle into a different one — one which works better for who you are now — which may not have worked for who you were before. And that way is no less right.

What do you do when life changes? You adapt. You make things fit you. You don’t make you fit everything else.

It’s ok to be broken. Being broken does not make you less than whole. It makes you different. And that’s ok.

Barriers to justice when rapists attack women with disabilities: Australian report

[This post was originally published on October 3, 2008 at Hoyden About Town.]

*trigger warnings apply to this post: descriptions of abuse and sexual assault against women with disabilities**

“This young woman [“Caroline”] has cerebral palsy, is wheelchair bound, totally dependent on carers for her personal and daily living activities, and non-verbal. Cognitively very aware, she depends on assisted communication to enable her to communicate … Caroline was sexually assaulted by the taxi driver who picked her up from home and drove her to school …

Caroline uses a communication book to communicate, but her communication book did not have the vocabulary she needed to describe what had happened to her. Her communication book did not include words such as “penis” or “rape”, and police would not allow these words to be added after the incident, because as the police explained, in court this would be seen as leading the witness. (Excerpt from an interview with a support worker cited in Federation of Community Legal Centres, 2006, pp. 7–8).”

Suellen Murray and Anastasia Powell of the Australian Centre for the Study of Sexual Assault have just released a new report: “Sexual assault and adults with a disability enabling recognition, disclosure and a just response” [PDF].

This report starts to fill a huge gap in our knowledge of sexual violence in Australia. Although data in North America has shown that women with disabilities (WWD) are far more likely to experience sexual violence than those without, up until now there has been little or no systematic research into what is happening with WWD in Australia:

Despite being the major national data collection regarding the status and experiences of adults with a disability, the ABS Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers, does not invite participants to report on their experiences of violence or abuse.

Similarly, the ABS (2006) Personal Safety Survey report, which specifically investigates experiences of violence, does not identify the disability status of participants, and the International Violence Against Women Survey (IVAWS) specifically excluded women with an illness or disability from the sample for the survey (Mouzos & Makkai, 2004).

Therefore, despite evidence that approximately 20% of Australian women, and 6% of men, will experience sexual violence in their lifetime (ABS, 2006), there is no standard national data collection that includes the experiences of sexual violence amongst adults with a disability, or more specifically, the experiences of women with a disability.

There is one smallish South Australian study showing that adults with intellectual disabilities are over ten times more likely to have been sexually assaulted.

Continue reading Barriers to justice when rapists attack women with disabilities: Australian report