Parents Who Kill

Tragically, necessity seems to be forcing the Canadian justice system to consider how we should treat parents who kill their disabled children.

It’s a fact that parents who care for children with disabilties are under enormous pressure.  There’s not enough funding for adequate supports in the home.  There aren’t enough options for effective, person-centred community supports.  It can be difficult, in this age of cut-backs and lay-offs, to  children what they need in the education, health, and social service systems; parents need to educated about their child’s rights, about the “systems” in which they’re involved, and about the most effective ways to advocate.  They need to do this and keep their families, jobs, and rest of their lives together.  It’s overwhelming.

For Robert Latimer, to do all this and to see his daughter in constant pain was too much. 

http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/307738 

I think that anyone who has ever seen their child in pain and wanted to do something, anything, to ease it, can imagine on some small scale what Rober Latimer must have been feeling when he put his daughter into a truck cab and pumped exhaust into it; I think we can appreciate that Robert Latimer wasn’t a hardened criminal, but a desparate parent, and his sentence reflected that.

However, Robert Latimer is being released on day parole this weekend, after an appeal to the Parole Board made after his December hearing; not because he adequately expressed remorse, which was why he was originally denied parole in December, but because the Parole Board feels he not likely to reoffend.

That’s all very well and good; but will this be the precedent?  The courts are going to have to ask if “not likely to reoffend” in the face of not showing adequate remorse is enough, considering that a mother recently drowned her autistic toddler in the bathtub after being told that surgery was not going to correct his developmental delays.

http://www.thestar.com/article/301289

Are these parents really likely to offend again anyway, given the circumstances of their crimes? 

Is it reasonable to expect them to show some remorse before letting them leave prison?  The Parole Board’s recent actions don’t seem to indicate so.

So what are we really imprisoning them for?  Is it just because we don’t know what else to do with a parent in that situation?

Tough questions.  Perhaps Tracy Latimer and Scarlett Chen may have expressed an opinion on it at some point…but they’re not here, are they?

Affirmative or Negative?

Several years ago, when I was trying to decide what I was going to do now that my life had been altered by the acquisition of my physical disabilities, I considered applying to teacher’s college.  I was surprised to see that being disabled might actually give me an edge with several universities; right on the form, they encouraged applicants from ethnic minority groups, who were gay, lesbian, bi-sexual or transgendered, or who had disabilities to identify themselves as such, as they wished their list of successful applicants to reflect the diversity of Canadian society.

This seemed to me similar to the “affirmative action” policies enacted in the USA (and Canada, under various names); I remembered arguing against them in an essay on race relations in university.  I didn’t like the idea of filling hiring quotas as a way to ensure diversity and encourage exposure to other cultures; I’d argued that people were going to see it as a form of reverse discrimination, and end of resentful of others who weren’t necessarily getting jobs based on the fact that they had the best qualifications.  If you really want to encourage diversity, I’d argued, level the playing field; make sure that everyone, regardless of race, has an equal opportunity at the education and skills training needed to become the most qualified person for a given job.

As I worked on the teacher’s college applications, the remembrance of this essay, and how strongly I’d felt about hiring quotas based on race, tugged at me.  As a person who’s “whiter than white”, I’d never thought that I’d have to wrestle with this in such a personal way, and yet here I was, faced with the question:  To disclose or not to disclose my disability, even if it helped me to do so? 

I sought the advice of several friends, and the consensus was that if I was being offered an edge, I should take it, because there’s plenty of difficulties that disabled people experience in school and the workplace that “abled” people don’t.  I saw their point.  I *did* end up doing some work as an educational assistant, and it was exhausting to begin with, but  seemed even more so because I wanted to prove that I could do the job as effectively as the rest of the EAs.

I never did end up finishing those teacher’s college applications, so I can’t tell you whether I would have chosen to disclose my disability at that time.  If I was writing them today…I wouldn’t.  I want my resume and accomplishments to speak for themselves; I don’t want my disability to do the talking for me.

Words, words, words

I imagine that this debate is probably old news to those that have studied disability culture for any length of time…but I’m still trying to sort out a lot of my thoughts on disability. 

I’m fascinated by the effect of what words we choose to use when we’re talking about people with disabilities.  When I first started volunteering with the Community Living Ontario movement at the age of 15, one of the first things I was oriented to was what language they preferred I use when speaking of the people with intellectual disabilities who are involved with the agency:

We don’t “take” people for walks or drives, we go with them.

We don’t “help”, we assist.

People aren’t “clients”; they’re “people we support”.

Fifteen years later, in my job with Community Living, this way of talking is now second nature to me.  However, there’s always room for these things to change (and I notice that they do change between agencies).  Personally, I don’t have a problem with the word “client”; I am not a family member to the people I support, I am providing a service to them, and they are choosing to use that service.  I certainly like “client” better than “consumer”, which is a term I know other agencies use. 

And, as a co-worker pointed out, if you’re driving a client to an out-of-town appointment, are you not “taking” them there?  Would you necessarily say, “I’m going with Joe” if Joe was a non-disabled friend that you were driving to an out-of-town appointment?

One of the great things about being involved with Community Living for a long period of time is that I’ve been able to see the language surrounding the people they support change and develop (as language tends to).  I feel that it’s consistently moving in a direction that increasingly affirms the equality and humanity of people with disabilities, and that’s been an exciting thing to see.

I’m still stuck on “disability” and “handicap”, however.  When I went through my training to work with people with intellectual disabilities (and self-advocates within the Community Living movement have said that they prefer “having an intellectually disability” to “mentally challenged” or the other variants that arose with the PC movement), my textbooks and teachers made a distinction between “disability” and “handicap” that I’ve always found very useful:  disabilities don’t have to keep people from participating fully in the community, but people with disabilities become handicapped when environments aren’t structured in such a way that people with disabilities can fully participate.  “Disability” is a physical reality; “handicap” is socially-determined.

I guess that’s why I identify myself as “disabled” and don’t see that as a particularly negative thing.  I had a stroke; I walk with a cane and I can’t use my left hand because my brain doesn’t work quite right.  Fact of life, not much I can do about it but choose to live the best life I can in spite of it.  However, when I can’t live the best life I can because the icy sidewalk hasn’t been salted and I’m in danger of falling…I’m handicapped, I don’t have the same opportunity as others (who are steadier on their feet) to best that I can be.

 And that’s not fair, because it doesn’t take much effort to eliminate the bulk of the handicapping influences that people with disabilities come across…

I’m looking forward to learning more about words.

Judge Rotenberg Centre – The Response

Matthew Israel, the executive director of the Judge Rotenberg Centre, has released this in response to recent media attention.

http://www.judgerc.org/responsetoblogs.pdf

I’ll let you decide what you think.  Wherever the truth lies, whether it’s with the media coverage, Israel or somewhere in the middle, I’m left feeling very, very uneasy…and wanting to urge all parents of kids with disabilities to make it their business to know *exactly* what is going on with their children in all the areas in which they receive support from other institutions (including public/private schools, hospitals, group home settings, day care settings).

Find out the questions that you need to ask and ask them.

Educate yourself on what legally can and can’t happen regarding support for your child.

Don’t ever be pressured into signing something (I’m not suggesting that this happened at the Rotenberg Centre; it’s just a good practice on principle.)  You should have the freedom to take a document away, look it over, and bring it back.  If you don’t, find out why.

Check out these other blogs to see what people are saying about the Judge Rotenberg Centre:

http://uppitydisability.blogspot.com/2008/01/1-14-07-blogging-against-aversives.html

http://lastcrazyhorn.wordpress.com
http://stirthis.blogspot.com/2008/01/on-culture-of-punishment.html
http://trinityva.livejournal.com/744340.html
http://mybignoise.blogspot.com/2007/01/were-better-than-this-aversive-therapy.html
http://qw88nb88.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/false-dilemmas-how-to-sell-pain
http://disstud.blogspot.com/2008/01/whatever-works-is-not-free-pass-for.html
http://growingupwithadisability.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-against-aversive-therapy.html
http://notdeadyetnewscommentary.blogspot.com/2008/01/blogging-against-aversives-little-late.html

Judge Rotenberg Centre

What better way to start a blog about disability issues than to write about state-sanctioned abuse of people with disabilities?

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/09/school_of_shock.html

I don’t understand why discipline that would warrant the intervention of social services if carried out in a home is okay in a school.  I can empathize with how difficult it must be for families to care for children with severe behaviours, but I find it incredibly disturbing that parents have somehow gotten the idea that administering electric shocks as part of a behaviour intervention program is acceptable.

For me, it highlights a need for thorough, professional, continuing education for parents of children with disabilities.  Parents need to know what behaviour interventions are appropriate and currently in use for people with their child’s diagnosis, what rights they have as parents when an intervention is used with their child in a given facility (including public schools, hospitals, group homes, etc), and, most importantly, what rights their child has.  Parents also need training to become effective advocates so that they can step in quickly and forcefully when they see something inappropriate happening; these children can’t defend themselves from something like this.

Parents also need training in how to educate their children about their rights.  Rights training needs to start at an early age.

Something is missing if parents are feeling desperate enough to go to institutions like this for help; there needs to more funding to allow parents access to safe, effective supports that keep them from that point of desperation.  And the education piece is vital.

I’ve known for a while that society is failing children with disabilities and their families, and the fact that the Judge Rotenberg Centre is still operating is horrific proof of that.