1:28pm July 25, 2013

➸ Trying to find the right words: youneedacat: Urocyon’s Jaunts: Heroification and...

Urocyon’s Jaunts: Heroification and Silencing

disabledtalk:

“Teachers have held up Helen Keller, the blind and deaf girl who overcame her physical handicaps, as an inspiration to generations of schoolchildren. Every fifth grader knows the scene in which Anne Sullivan…

The last time I wrote publicly about how brutalizing disabled people is horrible, people interpreted it as:

1. Intolerant of cultures where hitting people really hard is an accepted form of punishment.

2. “OMGWTFBBQ she’s saying that Helen Keller never should have been taught to communicate!!11!!!1!”

I wanted to slam my head on things at the end of that conversation.

It also really disturbs me the way that people who have been brutalized as a teaching method, especially if they are severely disabled, are taught to recite, and believe, the following:

“If it weren’t for my abuser, I would be a vegetable living in an institution and maybe even better off dead.”

Which first off, teaching people to use a slur to refer to one of their possible alternate universe type selves is horrible. Not even just the word, but the whole empty shell concept behind it.

Then there’s the “I was nothing until he came along” aspect of it.

But the very worst to me is the implication that there was no other possible outcome. No other possible way of teaching someone to communicate. Even though there are many ways to teach communication without hurting people in the process.

Although the thing where people overindulge a kid because they’re disabled happens, and it can turn extremely ugly when done in the extreme.

I know a girl. Well a woman, but I first met her when she was a little girl. She started out as a sweet, kind little girl who cared about others deeply. That was before her family got through with her.

She was diagnosed with autism and an intellectual disability. Her parents spilled her rotten. She never got in trouble for anything she did. She was never told she was behind in school, she was told instead that she was in gifted classes. Any time she did something mean or cruel, as EVERY kid does, she was either praised, rewarded, or had it blamed on her autism, “She can’t help it." They severely neglected her, neglected teaching her even rudimentary…. ANYTHING AT ALL. But everyone who saw it knew that they couldn’t prove neglect, because "autistic kids with intellectual disabilities can’t be expected to learn these things”.

She grew from a sweet loving child to a terrified, anxious, demanding, self centered teenager. Nobody set boundaries and she desperately wanted them without quite knowing what she wanted. She had long since lost the ability to care much about others, because her entire social world centered around her. Her parents became afraid of her. Her entire extended family began to compete to make her happy. They all dreaded getting on her bad side so much that they simply made the world revolve around her happiness even more.

Which didn’t exactly work, she knew things were wrong, she knew she was being lied to, but she still didn’t know what was wrong. Her personality and ability to care for others were becoming more and more warped by the artificial bubble environment they were building for her. Those abilities atrophied from disuse. But autistic people aren’t supposed to have empathy. So again people could blame her disability for everything. And her unhappiness led her to basically control the entire household and everyone else became afraid of her and reacted to their fear in dysfunctional ways.

Now she’s an adult who has long since lost the ability to care about anything or anyone beyond her immediate wants and desires. She tries to murder people and animals who don’t do what she wants, over extremely minor irritation. And by tries to murder, I mean things that will actually kill people if not detected and thwarted. Nobody knows about this except people close to her, because they fear she’ll be institutionalized.

Her parents want to keep her forever. She is living in a hell world. She is a victim of one of the most horrific kinds of abuse I have ever seen. One that has stolen from her, wonderful qualities that she used to possess in abundance. This making the entire world revolve around her is the worst form of torture I’ve ever seen. Worse than hitting for sure. No contest. Worse than anything I ever experienced, because at least I’ve come through it able to love and care about people and be in touch with my conscience.

But she’s not just an abuse victim. Because this kind of indulgence has atrophied her ability to give the slightest fuck about anyone but herself, she is now often a victimizer. I don’t know how often she tries to murder people, but from the stories a distant relative tells, it’s probably several times a day. She and her family are trapped in a horrible cycle and my guess is one day she will succeed in killing someone and get carted off to an institution for life. Her family are afraid of pissing her off so they all still compete to be her favorite. They have made no plans for after they die, also making it probable she will land in an institution.

I know she was badly abused. But at the age she’s at, and the severity of what she does to others, she’s still responsible for her actions.

But…she’s not the only person this happens to. Some parents respond to disability by letting the child run the house. This is terrible situation for every single person in the household. It’s very real. At best it makes the child tyrannical, at worst their conscience atrophies so far they become seriously dangerous. (And even people with an intact conscience can behave in dangerous ways under the circumstances. But it’s usually impulsive violence. Not the kind of cold, calculated murder this woman tries to pull off.)

Anyway even the best child can turn into someone capable of really hurting others when nobody gives them any boundaries at all because of disability. And at minimum, they become spoiled and learn to boss everyone around and control people with their moods.

Plus, catering to a child like that does not make them happy. It makes them miserable and confused, like they are lost in a void where they can’t see or understand anything. They can become severely depressed or secretly anxious or both.

I wanted to mention this because it’s not just a stereotype. It’s not just something people bring up as hyperbole in discussions of autism acceptance. It’s not just the stereotype of what Helen Keller was like before someone came along to slap sense into her.

It’s real. It’s deadly serious. It’s abusive and damaging. It makes the child miserable. It makes the family miserable. It hurts the child for life. And at the worst, it can turn someone into sort of an “artificial sociopath”, someone who so badly lacks experience using their conscience that they behave as if they never had one, harming people and animals along the way.

When this happens, it’s completely awful. Worse, the girl I mentioned? Her parents claimed to be big proponents of autism acceptance. But what they did was not autism acceptance. It was horrible neglect. Their take on autism acceptance was the same take on it many opponents have, “let’s teach our child absolutely nothing and cater to her every whim”. And they have no idea they are the cause of the problems they now live with. I can’t imagine how her siblings feel, but I’m betting they will get out of that house at the earliest opportunity.

It is really upsetting to watch this happen. It’s also really upsetting to hear people say this is what acceptance is. Because it’s not acceptance. It’s what people do when they’re terrified and confused by someone’s disability, so they let them do whatever the hell they want to do.

Anyway…just wanted to put that out there. I know you weren’t saying it never happens. But some people might take it that way. So I wanted to give the gory details of what happens when the “we don’t know what to do so the disabled kid can do no wrong” mentality gets into the head of parents. It’s one of the ugliest forms of abuse I have ever seen, and one of the most likely to turn the kid into an abusive person themselves.

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