The Silence Of The Sacrificial Lambs

Posted on February 07, 2022 by Dr EM

Should disabled children be used as props to make men with sexual fetishes feel better? It doesn’t seem like a difficult question, does it?

“At no point, while I was coming to terms with how my [severely disabled] daughter’s future was set to unfold, did I expect to find myself in a position where I would be forced to remind my elected representatives about something as basic as my vulnerable daughter’s need for same-sex care.

Anxieties about her having to endure acts of negligence, or maybe even cruelty, at the hands of an unprofessional person, once I am gone, have haunted some of my sleepless nights. However, I have been consoled with the knowledge that regulations and safeguarding policies would be in place to offer her protection from bad actors.

But what happens when somewhere along the line the differences between the sexes become artificially blurred, and the safeguarding that was in place can no longer be relied upon because of proposed reforms to current law?”

The above quote is part of the heartfelt plea of a mother of a disabled daughter. We know that women and girls are vulnerable to male sexual violence, we know that men commit 98% of sex offences and we know that disabled children are three to four times more likely to experience abuse.

We just don’t seem to care.

The United Nations Population Fund has highlighted how “in a study by the African Child Policy Forum of violence against children with disabilities, nearly every young person interviewed had been sexually abused at least once – and most more than once”.

Once they reach adulthood, the statistics according to research by DAME Magazine are terrifying:

“Eighty-three percent of disabled women experience rape or abuse, often at the hands of caretakers. And without a way to report their violations, the [perpetrators] frequently go unpunished.”

The magazine’s Victoria Brownworth argued that (in the US) “77% of rapes and sexual assaults were not reported to police. The enormity of that number suggests that within the context of disability, where so many victims may not even have access to language, or where the person they would report to is the same person perpetuating the assaults (and on whom they depend for their most basic care), the number may be perilously close to 100 percent.”

Alongside the significant risk of sexual violence, we know that girls and women experience an indignity and a trauma when they are forced to allow a male to undress them and touch their vulva, breasts or anus when they do not consent and do not want this touch. Sex is important.

Having become disabled as a teenager myself, it can feel like society has sentenced you to suffer at the hands of men. The figures and the possibilities of your future are stark. People look away at the obvious risks, they deny that you too need dignity, they claim “not all men”.

And while it isn’t all men, it’s also not just seven bad ones – they wouldn’t have the time to abuse all of these children and women.

‘In Ireland, a report analysing data from 14 rape crisis centres shows that almost half of the surveyed survivors with disabilities disclosed that they were subjected to sexual violence during childhood (48%), while one in ten disclosed that they were subjected to sexual violence both as adults and as children (10%).

Individuals with disabilities who use rape crisis centre services are more likely to have been subjected to multiple incidents of sexual violence than those with no disabilities (39% compared with 25%).”

Although it’s difficult to obtain data on disabled children as previously it hasn’t been seen as important enough to collect, the data which is emerging is showing a similar pattern across nations. Very vulnerable children and adults, particularly those who struggle to communicate, are seen as targets by predators. These predatory males will use careers where they can have access to these vulnerable children in order to abuse.

For example, evidence was given to the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry that a potential sex offender was being employed and moved around children’s homes, including a home for disabled children.

“Mr Dolan, former assistant area manager for the Glasgow South social work team, told the hearing in Edinburgh: “a man, who I don’t want to name, worked as a residential care worker for the local authority. He is now a convicted sex offender.”

Staff were expressing concerns about him and it seems that he got moved from a children’s home to a home for children with disabilities in the Pollokshields area and they were concerned how he had managed to get this. I am aware that this individual seemed to be very close to one of the most senior managers for the residential establishment”.

Frequently men will move into positions where they can have access to their targets. In May 2021 Dorrion Etienne was imprisoned for targeting and sexually abusing two learning-disabled girls at their school.

In August 2021 a former deputy headmaster and a head of care at a special needs school in Lincolnshire who raped and assaulted girl pupils over the course of 12 years were jailed for more than 23 years.

In November 2021 Robin James Elms was convicted and sentenced after he “targeted a child with special needs during a campaign of abuse in private homes where he worked as a freelance nanny and babysitter. He picked on children he thought were too young to speak up or who had learning difficulties and autism, grooming entire families in order to commit his abuse”.

Also in November 2021 it was reported that George Holden, “a former Derbyshire teacher and professional clown expects to die behind bars after being jailed for abusing young children. The court heard his previous convictions included sexually abusing blind and disabled children while working as a teacher at a special school”.

In December 2021 Brian Rudgley, an 83-year-old retired head teacher with years of experience working with children with special educational needs was imprisoned for sexually abusing a learning-disabled girl.

We have seen this pattern in institutions like sports clubs, charities and the Church to name just a few. Predators will move to where they can get to their prey. Yet still, politicians are behaving like such behaviour is beyond the realms of possibility. I am sick of them playing dumb and putting the wellbeing of the disabled at risk.

Indeed, it is once again being proposed by politicians that male feelings and male egos need to be prioritised and protected by law above the needs of the vulnerable, and those who too frequently experience sexual abuse at the hands of males. We are not even allowed to name the pattern – male sexual violence – in case it offends men.

Language had been changed to obscure reality. Parent P, who wished to remain anonymous, pointed out that “lots of people won’t think twice about a form only asking about gender, not sex too and also think these terms are interchangeable. The erosion and hijacking of our rights is so insidious”.

When it’s a form deciding what adult will be touching your child’s genitals, the difference between sex and gender identity is put in much sharper relief. Same-sex care is the most basic of safeguards and provides dignity, we should be able to choose it for ourselves and our relatives.

However, it commonly appears that NHS policies have been written according to Stonewall’s version of the law rather than the Equality Act 2010. NHS Lanarkshire’s “Supporting Trans Staff in the Workplace” dictates that employees:

“ensure Trans staff are treated as being of the gender in which they are living irrespective of whether they have undergone any hormonal or surgical treatment or have a Gender Recognition Certificate. It is unacceptable for colleagues and managers to refuse to recognise, for any period of time, a member of staff as belonging to the gender in which they are currently living.”

Translated, a cross-dressing man who gets aroused in women’s clothes is to be treated as a woman, and this includes allowing him access to disabled girls’ naked bodies.

The Equality Act 2010 makes it acceptable to discriminate on the basis of sex if there is a legitimate aim – this is known as a General Occupational Qualification (GOQ). If women and girls are to be naked it was widely accepted, before Stonewall poisoned the well, that a GOQ would automatically apply.

NHS Lanarkshire has pre-empted challenge on this point and commanded staff that male feelings come above the law in this regard. It declares that:

“the Equality Act 2010 provides limited exemptions for GOQ positions to restrict access to members of a particular gender [wrong, read “sex”]. These exemptions can only be applied in order to achieve a legitimate operational need.

All efforts should be made to enable Trans employees to work in positions, including those covered by General Occupational Qualifications, consistent with the gender with which they identify.

Where a person has a gender recognition certificate they must be regarded as being that gender for the purposes of GOQ positions. As the gender history of an employee is a matter of strictest confidentiality, this information should never be shared with service users.”

This secret-keeping about (mostly) males’ true sex, identity, and past means the scenario could arise that parents place their severely disabled non-verbal teenage daughter in a short respite care, thinking she will receive intimate care and be attended to at night by a woman, when in reality a man who gets aroused by cross-dressing has put on women’s clothes and is repeatedly washing the girl’s vulva.

Is that sexual abuse? The young girl will feel violated, will feel abused, will be traumatised. The parents will feel lied to, and wonder if they can ever trust the care of their daughter to Lanarkshire NHS again.

Allan Petrie, the chairperson of Glenlaw Parent/Carer Support Group, has written to Shona Robison, the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Housing and Local Government to raise parental concerns around the care of their disabled children, noting that “trans” is now an umbrella term encompassing all manner of groups including drag queens, crossdressers and “midlings”, whatever those might be.

(Googling produces nothing useful.)

It’s also argued within the LGB/T/Q/+ community that a range of extreme (and even illegal) sexual practices grouped under the term “kink” belong under the trans/LGBTQ+ “umbrella”.

The Q in LGBTQ+ (the official preferred term of people like the Scottish Greens) already stands for Queer, a term which organisations like Stonewall are very shy about defining in any meaningful way but appears to implicitly embrace “kink”, as being outwith “perceived norms” and “specific labels”.

Or put another way, it means whatever you want it to mean. Christina Richards – a transwoman who is Lead Psychologist and Head of Psychology at the UK’s foremost “gender identity clinic”, the Tavistock in London – has called for many extreme and violent sexual practices to be normalised and no longer classified as paraphilias – conditions “characterized by abnormal sexual desires, typically involving extreme or dangerous activities”.

(One such practice is “ageplay”, which Richards describes as “an adult identifying as a baby or young child, and is also known as adult baby/diaper lover (ABDL) or infantilism. There may be a sexual aspect… associated with humiliation”, while denying it has any link to paedophilia.)

Mr Petrie explained that to the minister:

“Our children are some of the most vulnerable children alive, they are non-mobile and non-verbal, they require 24 hour care including intimate care, as such we require to put our trust in professionals, at the moment we use the equality act to ensure that care is carried out by the same biological sex as our child, this is not just about safety but also our children’s dignity.

However if the Scottish government continue with this Act then ANY man can self-identify as a female be given a job within the care sector and if we refused to allow them to give our child intimate care on the bases of their biological sex then we could face prosecution under the proposed Hate Crime Bill.”

Research by NSPCC Learning together with Coventry University and the Ann Craft Trust presented the universalism of these parental anxieties around the care of their disabled children. One parent respondent described how

“We had respite at home and we installed cameras in the house for that reason, until they went. Nothing ever happened but it was just for me for those 2 hours while they were there. My son was so young, he still wouldn’t be able to explain. So I would check it every time that I would come home. Just so I knew he was safe.”

The research highlighted how “parents whose children had complex needs raised particular concerns regarding how incredibly difficult it was to teach their children about issues such as safe touch in their intimate care, puberty and changes in their bodies and about sexual abuse. Their greatest fears were that their child would not be able to communicate if they felt unsafe. One parent explained that her son used Makaton to communicate, yet there were no staff in his school that could use Makaton. As a result the child had no means of communicating with anyone”.

The sexual abuse of disabled children and young adults is so widespread that the NSPCC alongside the charity Triangle has developed a communication system for children to express abuse. Triangle highlighted that before their intervention, children who used symbol vocabulary to communicate could “communicate about the national curriculum but cannot say ‘leave me alone’.”

Due to the fact that disabled children did not have access to specific symbols which could communicate sexual abuse, safeguarding experts and investigators would sometimes have to hand draw images and thus accusations of coaching the child could be made. This added to non-verbal children being perceived as weak witnesses and subsequently cases not being prosecuted.

Consequently it increased the targeting of such children by perpetrators. Triangle has enabled disabled children and young people to get legal redress for crimes committed against them, by enabling disabled children to tell someone what’s being done to them. As part of developing the images, Triangle

“asked experienced interviewers about how young children and nonspeaking children have communicated about abuse. [They’ve] included images for a range of words that children use when they don’t know the ‘right’ word.

For children being interviewed using AAC, it may be more appropriate to offer them non-specific images rather than explicit ones which could be perceived as leading or coaching the child. For example, although the image set includes ‘erection’ and ‘ejaculation’, for young children it may be more appropriate that they have access to the images for ‘willy’, ‘hard’ and ‘squirt’.”

Yes, in our society we’ve had to develop a way for severely disabled children who may have mental ages of 6 to 8 to say “willy”, “hard” and “squirt”.

Once communication has been enabled the struggle to participate in the justice system doesn’t stop there. As well as access to communication, physical access to the courts is still a barrier as just 2% of UK courts are currently accessible to disabled people. This, frankly, is a denial of fundamental rights and what exclusion really looks like.

Alongside the obvious safeguarding issues and the need to maintain dignity for the disabled is the fact that a male carer would retraumatise disabled girls who have already been sexually abused by men. Ann West commented that “our disabled daughter was seriously sexually assaulted. We were assured she would always have women support staff especially as she needs assistance with all her personal care. Well I’m not remotely reassured, in fact I’m terrified for her future. This is so wrong on every level’.”

It is generally understood that women and girls who have been sexually assaulted and or raped by men find the presence of and touch of men re-traumatising, and this is no different if the women or girl has a disability. In fact it may be exaggerated because that man might be touching your vulva, breasts and other parts of your body. The statistics on abuse are stark – UNICEF estimates that children with disabilities are three to four times more likely to experience physical and sexual violence.

Why would a man want to do this? If he doesn’t care about the potential serious impact he will have on the disabled girl or woman, should he be in a caring position at all? Since when has it been acceptable to use disabled children as props to arouse men?

To most people it is astonishing that questioning a man touching your non-verbal disabled female child’s genitals could be a criminal offence, yet in Scotland it is about to become a hate crime.Why are politicians willing to re-traumatise potential abuse victims to fulfil men’s fantasies?

Dr EM is a disabled, feminist writer and historian. She writes under a pen name due to threats to her safety and tweets as @PankhurstEM.

Tags: guest post
Category comment, disturbing, misc, scottish politics
Trackback: trackback from your own site.

3.6K Comments

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

gregor

2 years ago

INews (2019): ‘SNP will insist Jeremy Corbyn takes a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to anti-Semitism’:

The SNP will insist that Jeremy Corbyn takes a “zero tolerance” approach to anti-Semitism if it lends him its support to make him Prime Minister, Nicola Sturgeon has said….

…the First Minister said she “deplored” his lack of leadership…

Jewish leaders in Scotland …telling Ms Sturgeon that she would be “doing a deal with the devil” if she helped Mr Corbyn enter Number 10….

…any party leader who wanted the support of the SNP to make clear its zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism, to Islamophobia, to any form of prejudice and racism…”:

Wings Over Scotland

The Silence Of The Sacrificial Lambs

Share this:

About

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Tags

Recent Comments

A tall tale

Support Wings

Wee Books

Video

Probably a robbery

Transphobia

Scottish Politics

Transcult

UK Politics

Zany comedy relief