To Protect and Serve?

image by Sanja Gjenero, accessed via http://www.sxc.hu

Recent media coverage on issues of justice and mistreatment triggered the next two blog postings.  This first posting, below, was published earlier this week on The Punch and on the ABC's Ramp Up.  A second posting, looking at measures such as regulators and mandatory reporting, will be out soon.

The Adelaide Advertiser story (Monday 27 June 2011, ‘Justice Disabled’) highlighted the apparent difficulties in securing convictions where a person living with intellectual disability has been the victim of an alleged sexual assault.

Some alleged assaults take place where people are receiving care.  This warrants closer examination, given the reasonable expectation that human services are meant to reduce risk of harm, not add to it.  Also, the greater the degree of disability a person lives with, the more likely it is the person will be living in a formal service arrangement, sharing with other persons living with similar degrees of disability and served by staff.

These arrangements typically involve people served in group settings, away from the view of the wider community.  To the casual observer, such arrangements might appear competent at safeguarding people’s wellbeing, with features like individual private bedrooms, qualified staff , and supervision by registered professionals.  The arrangements might also include an activities program, active monitoring, and guidelines that permit liberty-reducing practices, such as restraint or seclusion, as a last resort only. 

However, such arrangements do not guarantee protection from neglect, abuse or assault.  In fact, they can achieve the opposite.  When people are required to live together for no other reason than their degree of disability (or other disadvantage), it creates a situation where people are living on top of each other with very little to do.  It is not unknown for this to sometimes result in assaults between residents, a tragic situation that brings its own complexity in justice and yet could be largely avoided if we stopped herding people like cattle into group services.

image by Konrado Fedorczyko, accessed via http://www.sxc.hu

Worse, these group arrangements render the person vulnerable to the attitudes and outlook of staff, who have the capacity to exercise great control over the lives of those they are meant to serve.  The extent to which this can go badly wrong was illustrated in a UK Panorama investigation that revealed abuse and assaults perpetrated by staff on residents living with disability, in a state-of-the-art, high-cost ‘specialist’ service supervised by registered professionals (to view, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yuPvUHsx1Y&amp).

We cannot safely assume such practices are any less discoverable in Australia.  The less  we think about people living with disability as individual human beings, the less personalised will be the support arrangements, separating people physically and culturally from community life.  This can leave at least some people with no one in their lives other than paid staff and other people living with disability.   

That is wrong.

If we really want to tackle the problem of unprosecuted assaults on people living with disability, we must first discontinue the practice of grouping people living with disability on the basis of service convenience, be this a group home, a sheltered workshop or a special education class, and instead build personalised supports that bring people fully and visibly into community life. 

More than this, If we truly value diversity and shared wellbeing (which is the whole point of communities), we each need to take up our responsibility to welcome people living with disability fully into our neighbourhoods and our workplaces.  This is not an issue of rights but something more important - values.

Turning now to problems of justice, the main reason reported in the Advertiser is that the alleged victim, because of disability, might be an unreliable witness.  So what?  Witness testimony from anyone can be an unreliable source of evidence in criminal proceedings, and there are other sources of evidence that can assist prosecution.  There is no reason why an assault case involving a person living with severe disability, whose capacity to recall might be compromised, should be treated any differently from a case involving a frail older person, a child, or a victim who was incapacitated by alcohol or other substances at the time of the alleged offence.

Image by michaelaw, accessed via http://www.sxc.hu

A second issue is consent, whether the victim was a willing participant at the time of the alleged assault and changed their mind subsequently.  Many adults, from all walks of life, may have comparable stories of hindsight-driven regret, especially if the experience had turned out to be embarrassing, deeply disappointing, or even frightening.  Just like anyone else, a person living with disability is not immune to the possibility of such experience.  However, it would be a great mistake for us to assume that this is more likely to have happened simply because the person happened to live with disability. A far more important move, especially where the person is more vulnerable in their decision-making, would be to assure the availability to the person of good, accessible information and supports about consent and related matters.  

The bottom line?  Let‘s not further disable people by placing them in ‘support arrangements’ that do more harm than good.  Instead, let’s uphold the individual person’s right to an ordinary valued life, and assure the presence of safeguards so we do not fail people when the going gets tough.