No, it is not fucking ok for carers to hit people with disabilities on the head when they don’t do as they’re told. NOT. OK.
Why does this need saying?
At a football game at Saltergate, groups of Chesterfield fans “invaded” the pitch joyfully as their team defeated Bournemouth.
The Sun described the scene thus:
Supporters dodged stewards to pay their parting tribute to the League Two side before they move next season to a new ground in the town. Among them was a man on crutches and the young man wearing a baseball cap and dressed in the club’s blue and white colours in his wheelchair furiously pushing his wheels and speeding across the pitch.
Moments later an older man dashes on to the pitch and grabs the wheelchair and pushes it back to the stands. And as the youngster is shoved back across the pitch the older man gives him a playful clip across the head.
A spokesman for Chesterfield said: “It was a good natured pitch invasion resulted after the goal. To everyone’s amusement one youngster in a wheelchair got twenty yards on before being rushed off by an embarrassed helper.”
[WARNING for video footage]
This footage has been called “heart-warming” and “comical”, “legendary“, “hilarious” and “brilliant”, “touching” and “a joy”, “fantastic” and “priceless“.
One forum user said “The clip round the ear after is the best bit.”, another “The clip round the ear, pissed myself.”; another said “The slap on the head is great”.
I just want to cry. This footage is horrifying – assault and battery of a PWD who cannot get away, perpetrated by a carer, in full view of thousands. Assaults like this happen every day behind closed doors, as abusive carers and healthcare workers who have PWD trapped and dependent hit them and neglect them and rape them. And people around the world are laughing at this assault.
What is there to say? What is wrong with the world?
Categories: arts & entertainment, violence
The 62nd Down Under Feminists Carnival 
Our best sign yet that we are doing something right. 
Update on “We Will Not Go Quietly” zine: now fundraising for printed copies 
This week in Game of Thrones: Theon Greyjoy is horrid and horrider 
Hoyden About Town 
I was unreasonably relieved to see that the wheelchair user got to go out on the pitch with everybody else at the end.
I hate it that our culture generally treats embarrassment as justification to make trivialising jokes about revenge-violence. It doesn’t take far to go from there to “how dare you embarrass me like that” with accompanying actual violence, and we all know how embarrassing disabled bodies are.
I guess we can add ‘being spontaneous and excited’ to the list of able-bodied privelleges not afforded to PWD. How awful.
And I agree lauredhel, there are times when it seems everyone else has such an entirely different response to your own to something that you wonder if there is another planet available for you to move to.
There was a story yesterday, on the BBC homepage, or the Guardian online, that a woman didn’t receive any jail time for leaving a child with blind-deaf disability, in her pram, out overnight, in the cold and the child was just barely saved the next day by emergency workers. When are we, people with disabilities, considered “human” is the question?
Laurelhed, Stephen Drake quotes you on his http://www.notdeadyet.org blog in the most recent entry, which is on Ms Blog’s Carol King Support of Kevorkian.
There was a story yesterday, on the BBC homepage, or the Guardian online, that a woman didn’t receive any jail time for leaving a child with blind-deaf disability, in her pram, out overnight, in the cold and the child was just barely saved the next day by emergency workers. When are we, people with disabilities, considered “human” is the question?
Lauredhel, See that Stephen Drake quotes you on his http://www.notdeadyet.org blog in the most recent entry, which is on Ms Blog’s Carol King Support of Kevorkian. (I do not know for sure how to reach you or tigtog by email.)
Sanda, our contact details are on the “About” page, but we deliberately muddle them a bit to defeat spammers.
Here: HOYDENZ [[at]] GMAIL [[dot]] COM
I did receive your email about this story, and was going to go looking for a link so I could post it, but just didn’t find the time. When I get links in email, I can go and bookmark the story to add to the Femmostroppo Reader in seconds, but without a link it takes time I just don’t have.
Also, I’m not one for conversing one-to-one in email, never have been, so please don’t take lack of replies to such emails personally.
Direct links to Sanda’s two stories:
* No jail for woman who abandoned disabled girl
* Ms. Magazine Blogger Praises Kevorkian, Disses People With Disabilities, and Angers Some Feminists With Disabilities.
In relation to the horrific BBC story about the abandoned child I am not sure I can see what conclusions you can draw out of this for ableism? Neglect and abandonment happens to children – all children are vulnerable. And jail terms are frequently not handed down in these cases.
bluemilk: Disabled children are abused and neglected more often than abled children. Estimates vary from 70% more to nearly 300% more abuse against kids with disabilities (lots more at that link). In addition, the consequences can be far more severe because are less able to fend for themselves or defend themselves. This child, if abandoned at age 6 as an abled child, would likely have been able to go to help nearby, make a phone call, get herself warm, obtain food. She would probably know that what had been done to her was wrong. And would be able to communicate to another adult what had been done to her. There are substantial barriers to justice involving isolation, access to reporting, communication issues, whether victims are believed, and ability or inability to testify. Even further, abuse and even murder of disabled children is often excused on the basis that it’s “understandable” to abuse, neglect or murder such children.
Concluding that ableism is irrelevant because abled children get abused also would be kinda like saying that domestic violence against women has nothing to do with sexism because sometimes men are attacked too.
This UNICEF report has some more. Check the Background section first. (Actually, read the whole thing.) Some studies find that 90% of children with intellectual disabilities experience sexual abuse. 80% of Deaf people report sexual abuse experiences in childhood. The scope and severity of abuse against people with disabilities is absolutely ENORMOUS.
Remember, now, that this is not ‘simply’ a case of a person abandoning a six year old child to her own devices. It is a case of a person who effectively _tied up_ a six year old child in the freezing cold, and then abandoned her.
80% and 90% are mind-blowing figures, I just didn’t realise, which studies were these found in, do you recall? (If you have to go digging just ignore this request, I find Fridays tiring enough without blogs sending me off on long quests at the end of the week so understand if you feel the same). Was it a reliable figure, did you think? Recent? Did the studies get much attention? I am kind of speechless, those figures are terrifying!
The UNICEF report is truly heart-breaking reading. And just when you think it can’t get any worse you read about kids being subjected to torture as a form of exorcism, for crying out loud. But thanks for passing it on.
Whoops. I skipped the background of the UNICEF report. Now I see you told me to read that first. Sorry.
The page Lauredhel linked from “nearly 300% more” has lots of citations right there, at a glance the prominent figures are coming from:
Sullivan P. M. & Knutson, J. F. (2000) Maltreatment and disabilities: a population-based epidemiological study. Child Abuse and Neglect, 24(10): 1257-1273.
Sullivan, P. M. et al (1997) Maltreatment of children with disabilities: family risk factors and prevention implications. Journal of Child Centred Practice, 4(1): 33-46.
I’m not competent to evaluate the reliability and I don’t know about the impact of them.
Thanks Mary, the 80 and 90% figures I found in the studies referenced in the background of the UNICEF report, but still would be very interested to see the studies themselves. Not sure how readily available they will be.. but those figures, I can’t get past them, just mind-blowingly awful.
I didn’t realise the difference between abuse rates generally for children and abuse rates for children with a disability – the word ‘vast’ doesn’t even cover it. I have always seen children as just hugely vulnerable but of course, and had I thought further about it I would have soon guessed, there are some groups of children who are very, very much more vulnerable than others.
I hope I didn’t hugely offend you with my ignorance lauredhel and sanda, and apologies for drawing you, lauredhel back to square one of ‘understanding ableism’ on my account.
Consider me (a little more) informed and (a lot more) horrified.
bluemilk: if you hadn’t asked, the lurkers who were wondering the same thing wouldn’t have seen the figures and reports, eh?
It’s horrible. And largely ignored. And GRAH.
bluemilk, I read through your comments and before I could get to the bottom to reply, “The girl is disabled and the woman was her carer/caregiver; she had a carer in relation to her being disabled”, you had a wonderful evolving. I can assume you are a woman?
I understand when someone doesn’t “get it” at first. I got my disability education as a disabled adult, even though I had a father who was disabled (WWII) when I was a toddler and an aunt who was a polio survivor in braces. I didn’t “get it” until I was “it”.
Thank you sanda. Yes, am a woman.