Comments on: Study Shows High Rates of Violent Crime Against People With Disabilities

By: Tlönista

Tlönista — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:02:59 +0000

Acquiring a disability can also mean an end to your “regular life”. PWD don’t deserve to live it without exploitation and violence? I guess that doesn’t fit into the “liberal” choice paradigm…

Thanks for blogging about this, Cara.

By: Cara

Cara — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:01:29 +0000

Sailorman, I wasn’t trying to imply anything about the language that you used, merely attempting to answer your question about the language that I did.

By: Sailorman

Sailorman — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 21:37:21 +0000

Just to be clear: I said “often easier targets for crime, especially those with mental disabilities.” That was deliberately qualified and relative.

It doesn’t seem that we disagree much; i’m just trying to make sure that you don’t think I was trying to, as you put it,

# Cara says:
…to say that they are inherently anything that is not along the lines of “worthwhile as human beings” is to get yourself on the fast track to fucked up ableist generalizations.

when I was trying to avoid just that.

By: Margaret Cho bleaches, sings « FemBot

Margaret Cho bleaches, sings « FemBot — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:04:49 +0000

[...] High Rates of Violent Crime Against People with Disabilites Posted by thedailyhavis Filed in wtf Leave a Comment » [...]

By: Cara

Cara — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:37:00 +0000

YES to what peanutbutter said.

By: peanutbutter

peanutbutter — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:45:39 +0000

The bit about “natural” limitations is an absurd slope. I’ve pointed out before how the support structure of society is biased toward abled people for no particularly good reason. That the blind person can get shortchanged is not an inherent function of his blindness, it’s because we design our money in such a way that there’s little besides sight to distinguish. (Other countries, for example, have different sizes for different denominations or textures and the like as additional markers.)

What our ablist society ignores is that we are all vulnerable, in various ways, and that vulnerability is very often reinforced by cultural and societal norms. But it’s just easier to pat the disabled on the head (or ignore them altoghether) rather than consider what’s really going on.

By: Persia

Persia — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:42:04 +0000

You know what else can mean an end to your ‘regular life?’ Having kids, period, full stop.

AmandaW@17:

Women with physical disabilities are subject to a similar rate of violence as women without; it is women with mental/intellectual conditions who are subject to a high rate of violence. It’s almost as though it’s not about targeting someone who can’t run away, but targeting someone whose voice will not be heard by hir community.

Just like children who don’t have strong family structures will often be targeted by child molesters– it’s the person who won’t be heard and/or doesn’t have a support system to lean on. It’s so ugly.

By: coldneedles

coldneedles — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:43:27 +0000

Yeah, I would have had said exceedingly except I’ve been having to sugar coat and swallow a lot of shit in my real life regarding disability and unfortunatly that’s carried over.

Thanks for not making this a place where I have to do that.

By: Cara

Cara — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:17:08 +0000

It’s an exceedingly inappropriate comment, and I can’t even fathom why someone would think it was appropriate. I was originally going to go into a long list of reasons why it’s inappropriate until I realized that it was just setting up a long and defensive back and forth about what was really meant. So coldneedles said it best. It’s inappropriate and it’s derailing in a rather ugly way.

So stop it. Now.

By: coldneedles

coldneedles — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:52:54 +0000

I do wish there was a recourse for parents who no longer wanted to take care of a kid to drop them off into state care or something like that. A severely disabled kid can otherwise mean an end to your regular life and as a liberal I prefer that people have a choice in how they live it.

To be honest I think this is a fairly inappopriate comment on this thread, which is about violent crime against people with disabilities and not about caregivers. Frankly it smacks of derailing.

How hard it is to care for a severly disabled child should have nothing to do with systemic violence against people with disabilities.