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1:46pm February 19, 2012

I don’t remember how I got to this video.

But it really freaked me out. It was a family member of a disabled guy. And she was manipulating his body and pointing to the various body parts that were different than usual. Without any sense of caring what he wanted. While he did everything in his power to shove her hands away and cover up the body parts she kept pointing at. And she didn’t even seem to respond to the intent, she just overpowered his hands and kept on going.

It reminds me of when I met the mother of a girl with a more severe form of something I had been suspected of having. And I still remember her grabbing her head and shoving it around to show me what was different about it. With, again, not asking permission, not responding to any of her daughter’s actions, no sense of knowing or caring that her daughter actually had a mind. (And she later confirmed to me that until she met me she hadn’t even considered that her daughter could think. I’ve heard that from a lot of parents of autistic children, and it never gets easier.)

Seeing that done to someone based on physical traits I shared with them really affected me in ways I can’t even describe. And I’ve seen this with so many family members of disabled people. They are so used to moving them around to take care of them, that they forget they have no justifiable reason to touch them however they want whenever they feel like it. And aside from it being a form of physical violation in itself, it sets people up for further abuse because it teaches us that people have a right to touch us in any way they want at any time they want for any reason they want, and that struggling will be ignored.

I’ve also found that people who don’t respect their own children this way, usually won’t respect me this way. At minimum they will assume that since I am disabled too, then they have the same authority over me that’s normally reserved for parents over young children. And they will generally not respect any other boundary either. It’s like they think that because some of the usual boundaries have to be crossed taking care of their disabled child, then those boundaries can be crossed all the time, with any disabled person.

Even when the boundaries are less physical, like with many parents of autistic children, this can still happen. And seems to be behind something I’ve seen for years and years, which is assuming that all autistic people of whatever age are children, and that when autistic adults start talking about our own rights then we are just being like rebellious teenagers who don’t know that our parents know best. It’s again one of those things where they think their parental authority extends to all of us. And I’ve seen examples totally independent of each other that go back at least 15 years. It’s a really disturbing phenomenon (if you actually happen to be disabled) no matter what form it takes. It always turns my stomach to see someone treated this way.