12:38am October 11, 2014

It never fails to make me cringe

(Content warning for discussion of disabled people being treated in squicky ways)

When I encounter groups of disabled people (usually, but not always, teenagers) in shopping centers being led around by staff. Mainly because there’s this whole dynamic that I perceive like a wallop to the face. Where the staff just…seem to have no real boundaries with the clients. I see them “steering” clients by the shoulders when the clients notice something of interest on a shelf. It would be one thing if this were all about providing sensory feedback to overcome inertia or help navigate through a crowd, but this doesn’t look like that at all.

And there’s this really obnoxious vocal cadence they (the staff) often use, that I would almost wager they are *trained* to use, given how common it is. It sounds almost like a voice you would hear in a cartoon being used by someone scolding a naughty puppy. And I am just thinking, good grief, these people are at least high school age, why would anyone talk to them like that?

But really the thing that gets me is that with a few slips of fate, I could have ended up in one of those places and been allowed in public only in the company of someone who talked to me like that. So when I see these teenagers, I don’t see it in an “oh how nice, look, those poor kids are getting an Outing in the Community!” warm fuzzy kind of way, I see all the ways in which their freedom is actually being restricted, and the way the staff basically has them on leashes, just not the physical/visible kind. :/

Parades.

That’s what my brother calls them.

I’ve been in parades since I was a teenager.

They tend to call them “outings into the community”, which rubs me the wrong way on so many levels.

My staff/client picture was a one-on-one version of a parade.

Just like institutions can be just one person, a parade can be one person and one staff.

Does it disturb me that I think of us as “people” and them as “staff”? Yes. It’s caled being conditioned by the system Staff have the opposite problem. They are “people” and then there’s “clients” who are… not quite people. Only when staff have that view, it damages clients, and when clients have that view, it can be a problem but it doesn’t result in death and tragedy.

And in reality I do see staff as people. All my staff are people I have great relationships with, really good ones, amazing ones especially for the field they’re in. They retain their humanity and their boundaries and we can have wonderful friendly relationships without being friends and it’s great.

But they have power over me and I never forget that.

And when with other DD people it’s just so easy to slip into referring to us as “people” and staff as “staff”.

Anyway, the parades…

You see a staff at the beginning, maybe two staff or more. Then you see a line of DD people, often moving and reacting to our environments in unusual ways. Usually some have CP, some have intellectual disabilities, some have brain damage, some have autism, and some have a combination of several of those. People are talking, with a wide variety of ‘disability accents’, and are also usually some people squealing or making other unusual sounds. Sometimes there are staff going up and down trying to make people look or sound more 'normal’, but most of the time they’re too busy making sure we’re all there and doing whatever we’re supposed to be doing. For whatever reason, in almost every 'parade’ I’ve been in, there’s been exactly one person with braces and crutches who takes a long time to walk and occasionally gets yelled at for that. Some people are stimming or ticcing, always, and a lot of people have unusual postures. There’s sometimes a few disabled people who can and do try to pass themselves off as staff, and they can be twice as condescending as (bad) staff generally are.

And yes, staff tend to set the tone for how to treat us, and if staff are treating us like children, then the public treats us like children as well.

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