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11:05pm May 19, 2012

➸ fighting my corner: youneedacat: “You don’t need this junk. You need a cat.”: STOP STOP...

youneedacat:

“You don’t need this junk. You need a cat.”: STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP

whutyoufelloverfor:

youneedacat:

Almost out the door of a conference. Just telling a staff person what a great contrast it was to the last big thing I went out to. (The…

It’s not universal, but then few rules for interacting with people are, disabled or not. I’m autistic though (among lots of other things) so that makes it way closer to a universal no. But I’ve known autistic people (especially this one guy) who love to lean in close to people’s faces or have it done to them (he liked to be about two inches from your eyes wagging his fingers back and forth from his face to yours). So nothing is universal even there. Which is why I find most lists of rules for interacting with disabled people kind of dubious at best.

But basically for most people there’s two factors. One is how much personal space they like. Another is who the person is. There have been people I had no problem getting up in my face and others who I couldn’t comfortably occupy a large room with. This woman was way toward that second end of the spectrum. It can also depend on time of day, stress level, culture, everything that affects most people.

Plus a lot of people with disabilities are trained since infancy to accept approach levels that for a nondisabled person would be considered assault. So you can’t always assume if we don’t react it’s okay. In fact if you’re not really close to us and you’re touching us for nonessential reasons and we don’t mind, that’s a problem. In fact, the person who taught me that about myself did a really good DVD on that subject – The Ethics of Touch – that starts dealing with what happens long before you’re near enough to touch someone. If the agency that runs your group home doesn’t already have a copy they should order it from Diverse City Press. The speaker, Dave Hingsburger, has worked in the DD field for most of his adult life and is now physically disabled himself. I’ve never read anything published by him that wasn’t worth reading even when I disagreed. Diverse City Press sells a lot of his books, two of the most important ones being short and cheap – Power Tools is one and First Contact is another. He has a blog called Rolling Around In My Head. And if he hasn’t been thinking about this stuff longer than I’ve been alive, it’s damn close. But seriously The Ethics Of Touch and those two booklets should be the minimum required for anyone working in the system.