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7:15pm September 2, 2013

Sexual assault of disabled girls in special ed

This is taken off another thread so the OP doesn’t have to see it.  But it was about how when disabled boys aren’t taught sexual boundaries disabled girls in the same segregated settings get hurt.

Direct description of sexual assault follows.

When I was in special ed I was assaulted twice by boys in the same school.  AND a boy from the school had assaulted me in a really awful way in a mental institution.

The teachers told me it was my fault for not picking up that innocent things these boys said were preludes to assault. (One grabbed my breasts, one forcibly grabbed my foot and masturbated with it.  Both after perfectly innocent sounding conversation that it was my fault for taking literally.)

I was not allowed to talk about it or warn other girls even though I turned out not to be the first they had assaulted. I was told it was confidentiality therefore only people who had been assaulted by them could talk to each other about it but we were not allowed to tell anyone else. And it was our fault for not magically knowing. 

The boy who assaulted me in the mental institution, I was catatonic and completely unable to move and he stuck his foot up my pants and wiggled his toes inside my butt.

His name was Sandeep.

When I told our mutual special ed teacher?

Her response, “Oh my god that is SOOOOOOOOOOO Sandeep!”

Her tone was fond and humorous. All the teachers laughed fondly. Nobody seemed to grasp that being assaulted, while unable to move, in front of a room full of onlookers who were not doing a damn thing to stop him, could possibly be the slightest bit traumatic. The onlookers did nothing because they assumed I couldn’t feel it.

Oh also I wasn’t allowed to dislike these boys or harbor any negative feelings towards them because “we are all here for a reason”.

Also there was an intellectually disabled teenager with cerebral palsy and he used to put his arm around any woman who came close and use a variety of bad pick up lines.

Everyone thought it was CUTE.  They stopped him but they laughed fondly too.

Anyone notice how in segregated disability settings of all kinds, staff are better than disabled people because they’re above it all and like all of us? And disabled people are bad for sometimes showing dislike for each other, because we just don’t understand that each one of us is equally special or some crap. But staff don’t realize that liking every disabled person they ever meet is a sign of bigotry, not virtue?