11:56pm February 17, 2012

➸ lemon curry?: Being called "unable" to say "yes" means not being allowed to say "no." [TW: ableism, rape] [Content warning: consent]

neurodivergentsexuality:

fugue-stasis:

[Content: rape culture, sexual violence against autistic people]

neurodivergentsexuality:

by Devyn

An autistic woman and sexual abuse survivor was just declared to be “incapable of consent” in the UK. Let me repeat that: someone who has experienced and survived genuine sexual assault was just banned, against her wishes, from having consensual sex.

And I feel like, this duality—forced “sexlessness” paired with forced sex—is so fundamental to the ways that developmentally disabled people are oppressed. Because statements about how intellectually disabled, autistic, or otherwise neurodivergent people “cannot consent” are definitely not actual evaluations of an individual’s abilities: they’re just a decision about our rights. When someone says that neurodivergent people “can’t” make the call about our own sexualities—what happens to our bodies, who we’re intimate with, and what forms that intimacy takes—they are really just saying that we shouldn’t be allowed to. This case was never a debate about whether or not H, the woman in question, “should” be having sex or what kind of support she should be getting or how that sex should be negotiated, it was just confirmation that—above all else—the decisions about her sexuality should always be made by people other than herself.

I’m having a really hard time being coherent about this. I bolded the only part that’s really coming together for me.

The article I link to doesn’t quote H once, BTW, but it does mention in passing that she seems to be under full-time care by professionals in order to ensure that she doesn’t go out and get laid.

Meanwhile, not mentioned: 44 percent of all sexual violence against people with intellectual abilities is perpetrated by those professionals (personal care attendants, transporation providers, etc). This is what we’re up against. This woman is being put IN DANGER OF RAPE for fear that she might exercise her fucking sexual autonomy.

Since some people were asking in the reblogs: because H was determined to be incapable of consent, she is in “1:1 supervision,” meaning that she has to have a staff person (like a personal care attendant) with her at all times. According to the source: “H [is] not free to leave her accommodation on any other basis, even to attend her part-time employment.” Until she is deemed “capable of consent,” it seems likely that this will continue to be her situation. That’s right, as a protection against sex, she is being kept in close proximity to the people statistically most likely to sexually assault her.

And to answer one person’s question: yes, it technically follows that any sex H has ever had—including sex she initiated, wanted very much, understood, and enjoyed—would be considered rape. HOWEVER, this ruling has not inspired the courts to bring H’s “rapists” to justice. Instead, they’re just going to control the potential victim. Nice. NICE.

-Devyn

Yeah - one of the worst lines in that whole article was that she was incapable of consent due to “having participated in sex that she did not consent to” … in other words having been Sexually Assaulted/Raped (with that important idea being passed through some F***ed-up ideological and linguistic filters to end up with that crap sentence)

“Hey you’ve been raped - multiple times so let’s take away your legal ability to have any say in your sex life whatsoever - possibly permanently, at least until a judge decides that you can “have it back.”“

What a fucked-up idea.

(And this is also one of the reasons the way mentally disabled people are treated as eternal little children/unable to understand their own lives sucks. It just feeds into stuff like this.)

Yes this is exactly why I was willing to take a lot of flak about being a mean horrible person, when I tried to tell a parent-advocate what her view that her son wasn’t a real adult, actually meant in the lives of people like me. Because it has meant for DD people in general, everything from things like this to involuntary sterilization and having their children taken away.

Also I want to point out a few things about those of us who live in the DD system. Generally, that means people who’ve been disabled since childhood, with intellectual disabilities, autism, cerebral palsy, epilepsy, brain injury, or anything causing similar impairments. And to be in the system we either have to have (or be thought to have) impairments in specific areas we need support for, or else people who were permanently institutionalized as children often end up staying in the system whether those impairments exist or not. Which kinds of disabled people qualify for services differ by region. And lots of people who qualify don’t end up getting services because the state tries like hell to deny them (even to people who need total care), because some people don’t want services, and because some people’s families don’t want them having services.

So first thing: Most people in the system have to deal with being denied the ability to consent to sex. It’s getting better but it’s not gone. People who have certain kinds of guardians, whether they’re otherwise in the system or not, end up with the guardian being allowed to make all decisions about their sex lives and even about who they can be friends with. Some people without guardians have their parents making the decisions while the state looks the other way because they “obviously” can’t consent and nobody’s advocating on their behalf. Most people in the system have at least some degree of control taken away from us about whether we can have or consent to sex – whether our agencies, group homes, etc. pay lip service to our sexual freedom or not, and whether we have guardians or not. And really even now I still think it’s most of us. I’ve been in the DD system almost all of my adult life and that’s what I’ve seen. Even when DD people technically have the freedom to consent to sex, in practice we often don’t, and if we try we can and do get punished.

So try to remember that not being allowed to consent to sex isn’t rare or about just one person. Anyone under certain kinds of guardianship has this right legally taken away. And most people in the DD system have it taken away one way or another. So do a lot of other disabled people but the DD system is the one I know best.

I understand why people are talking about how the supervision she’s placed under puts her at higher risk of rape. Because it makes the whole thing nonsensical. But try to remember, and acknowledge, that anyone who truly needs the system to survive is at the same risk or more.

I need services to survive. I also need someone else to bathe me, and I need daily care that involves directly touching various private parts of my body to prevent infections and bedsores. This means that despite being one of the lucky ones who is truly able, not just in theory, to consent to sex without being given trouble over it at this point in my life, I’m still at really high risk for abuse, and really high risk of not having anyone believe me if I report abuse.

For someone where they have justified reasons for touching those parts of your body, all it takes to become abuse is a subtle change in the quality of the touch – and not even necessarily to a private area; most people know the difference between a clinical touch and an intimate caress no matter where it is(*).

I have experienced this. It took me straight back to being molested as a kid. It was clear. It was obvious. And I never reported it. I eventually denied her entry to my apartment but I never reported it.

I’ve had clear-cut cases of physical abuse, with witnesses, be denied by adult protective services. My state’s APS is known to be one of the worst in the country. I would not have stood a chance with them, nor in court if I took it that far. I would have had to go through the humiliating and degrading process of describing what happened over and over again. To strangers. They would have brought up the that she was female, and women don’t sexually abuse. (In the DD system they sexually abuse at a rate higher than men.) They would have brought up that I am a lesbian, so maybe I was just “enjoying it” or something equally perverse. They would have brought up that I am autistic, and therefore incapable of understanding sensory information or reading people correctly. And there would be a heavy undercurrent of “look at her, she’s just a retard(**) and can’t know or understand anything”.

So for months on end, this woman came into my apartment most nights and caressed my naked body without my consent and I felt too trapped to do anything for a long while. If you complain too much they find ways of getting back at you. Sometimes it’s a choice between the abuser who does your care right, and the incompetent people they would send in her place. Or worse, the total lack of people that they can passive-aggressively send you when they’ve decided you’re too much trouble to bother with at all. I’ve been threatened with institutionalization for refusing two staff out of dozens. Fortunately my complaint about that won, but you never know.

So DD people both face being denied the ability to consent, and being sexually assaulted, constantly. Both with the force of law behind it and on a de facto basis. This is not rare. This is not new. I am glad people are kicking up a fuss about this woman. I hope she gets out of this horrific situation. But the people I’ve spent virtually all of my offline time around, my entire adult life and a lot of my adolescence, are going through this or things very like it, too. Please don’t forget the rest of us.

Dave Hingsburger has a very important video out called The Ethics of Touch. It’s designed for direct care staff (and the agencies they work for) in the DD system to design every possible level of privacy, boundaries, and other aspects of sexual abuse prevention into the lives of people they care for. I guarantee it has ideas you’ve never thought of, and it starts at levels far before actual physical touch happens. It’s expensive for most disabled people but agencies can easily afford it. I strongly recommend checking it out if at all possible.

It taught me all kinds of things I now incorporate into my life. I used to think it was silly that I should care who saw me naked or on the toilet. The video taught me that not having those boundaries, in American society, meant that I was missing the first cues to someone who might abuse me, and that literally the first clue I’d have to whether I was being abused would be the moment someone touched my body, if then. Now that I’ve forced myself to learn these things, I’ve been able to spot people I couldn’t trust – like the woman who insisted on coming in the bathroom while I was taking a crap and laughed when I told her not to. I never would have noticed before. But his tips are much more complicated and useful than just stuff like that that “everyone knows”. I can’t recommend it strongly enough. Not that there’s no problems, but that none of them are bad enough to outweigh the extremely important ideas it contains. Not just about sexual abuse but about all kinds of other horrible things that can be prevented or reduced by actually using proper boundaries while giving care.

Wow. I didn’t expect to be able to write all that. Now my brain and body are both trashed. But it’s important, if we want to prevent both of these problems from affecting a really wide range of people out there.

(*) Although DD people are less likely to know and therefore again at higher risk of abuse.

(**) That’s a slur used against me on a regular basis and I can damn well make it explicit when people are thinking it without saying it in my presence. Don’t anyone even think about getting on my case for this.

Notes: