as small as a world and as large as alone

8:31pm August 3, 2014

lichgem:

j0ye:

thelilysparks:

It’s amazing that people will see a kid yelled at or manhandled by a parent and say “It’s not my business, you can’t tell someone how to raise their kid” but if someone lets their son wear a dress it’s a public discussion.

THIS IS VERY RELEVANT

I remember something I read recently where a woman’s toddler liked to wear headbands, and an adult man in public was SO fucking bothered by it he came up and physically assaulted her son, and verbally assaulted her, and nobody did anything about it.

By physical assault I mean I think he yanked the headband off the kid’s head and gave him a “going to disguise my hostility as playfulness” cuff on the ear.

TW for public sexual assault of a developmentally disabled woman.

I once watched a man sexually assault a woman with Down’s syndrome in public.  She was sweeping the top of a table at my community college.  Some guys were obviously egging him on to do something, getting more and more excited.  He ran over, jumped up on the table, kissed her on the lips and then the breasts and then the crotch, as she stood stock still like she couldn’t believe what was happening.  I immediately reported the guy but nobody else did a damn thing, in fact I was the only person looking straight at her the entire time.  If I’d had the ability to initiate social conversations, I would’ve comforted her, but the most I could do was run to the disabled students’ office and tell them what had happened.  I’m still haunted by not having done enough, and by the way everyone besides me literally turned their heads away so they wouldn’t have to see what was happening.  The guy ran off laughing.  And I remember wondering whether I did the right thing to tell on the guy, because I was so unsure of my own ability to read social situations at that point that I felt like any reaction I had was probably wrong.  But the disability office told me I did exactly what I should have, that they knew the woman in question, and that they would be helping her.  And given that this community college had the best disability office in the entire state at that point (Anne was also going to the same college the same year, and used the same office I did), I believe that they did everything they could to help her and to get that guy in as much trouble as they possibly could.

I’ll never forget her face.  She just stood there, looking stunned, like she couldn’t believe, and yet she could believe, and was resigned, and traumatized, and violated, but numb and stunned and too stunned to do anything but stand there while his friends applauded loudly and laughed.

I wish I could go back in time and stop the whole thing.  I wish I was me-now because now I would never not directly intervene in a situation like that.  In fact I have intervened in situations like that, since.  But I was just out of institutions back then, and not out of the psych system, and I had only a tiny bit more nerve than the woman standing on the table.  :-(  I can also remember being her, sitting there doing absolutely nothing while a crowded room full of people (institution inmates and staff alike) watched someone stick his foot up my ass and wiggle it around for quite some time.  I didn’t move an inch, and was told later that nobody did anything because nobody thought I understood.  I wonder if that’s what the bystanders told themselves about the woman with Down syndrome.  I have never seen a human being look as defeated and miserable as she looked in that moment.  I will never forget it.

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