I'm going to take it for absolute granted that KingsHeath83 has never ever thought about how vulnerable disabled women may be, and is never going to educate her- or himself. I am also certain KingsHeath83 has never thought about the scale of disability. For example my level of disability doesn't make me vulnerable, but leads me to empathise with those worse affected. However, you see a lot of complete smuggos using people like me as an excuse to dismiss the issues of those with more severe needs.
Generally speaking, there is very little social kudos attached to being aware of how marginalised disabled people are. More specifically, I have seen the disablism of trans activists firsthand. It's got to the point that I associate trans activism with vicious mockery of disabled people.
So therefore today I will be educating the ignorant.
extract
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 perps frequently go unpunished.
Despite the emergence of the #MeToo movement, we have still seen women’s voices belittled, dismissed, and outright silenced as they’ve testified against the men who have sexually assaulted them, from Bill Cosby’s and R. Kelly’s accusers to the congressional testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Imagine, then, the plight of those who so often don’t have a voice. Right now in America, disabled women of all ages and intellectual and physical capacities are being sexually assaulted by the very people pledged to their care and protection—nurses, aides, and other caregivers—often in nursing homes, long-term care facilities and group homes that advertise compassionate and loving care in a home-style environment. Hacienda HealthCare, in Phoenix, Arizona, is one of those places.
It was a shocking story. A young Native American woman who is severely disabled, non-verbal, and incapable of moving on her own, gave birth to a baby at Hacienda HealthCare, a long-term care facility, on December 29, 2018. The woman had been living at the facility since she was 3 years old. Although initial reports described the woman as in a “persistent vegetative state, her family has since clarified that she is not, but has “significant intellectual disabilities as a result of seizures very early in her childhood.”
Though its website portrays a diverse, compassionate, loving home serving “infants, children and young adults who are ‘medically fragile’ or have developmental disabilities,” the story unfolding at Hacienda HealthCare since the initial discovery of the woman’s giving birth paints a starkly different portrait. The panicked call to 911 operators reveals that nurses, who called because the baby was turning blue, weren’t even aware the patient was pregnant.
On January 16, pending investigations, Arizona state regulators, including the Arizona Department of Health Services, ordered the facility to retain a state-approved third-party manager to oversee the daily operations of the facility. They collected DNA samples from male staff who had contact with the woman, and on January 23, Nathan Sutherland, 36, a licensed practical nurse (that is a nurse who provides basic and more intimate nursing care), was arrested on suspicion of one count of sexual assault and one count of vulnerable adult abuse.
The case raises myriad questions, not the least of all, how this woman’s caretakers—who change and bathe and dress her and tend to her menstrual needs—failed to notice she was pregnant. Though its website portrays a diverse, compassionate, loving home serving “infants, children and young adults who are ‘medically fragile’ or have developmental disabilities,” the story unfolding at Hacienda HealthCare paints a starkly different portrait. The call to 911 operators reveals that the nurses were in a state of panic, unaware that the woman was even pregnant. Equally troubling was that Phoenix police did not initially call the incident a sexual assault—why? “I can’t think of a legitimate reason not to call it what it is,” said former chief sex crimes investigator Bill Richardson. “The woman who gave birth is incapable of giving consent, that means that it’s a sexual assault. It’s that simple,” he said.
In a January 9 statement, the family’s attorney John Micheaels said they were “outraged at the neglect of their daughter,” adding that “the family would like me to convey that the baby boy has been born into a loving family and will be well cared for.”
A week later, after Hacienda was ordered to obtain a third-party manager, Micheaels released another statement to the press from the family, which said in part, “The facility chose not to express any remorse or apology for the inexcusable failure to protect and safeguard their vulnerable daughter.” Hacienda said five days later that the two doctors caring for the young woman were no longer caring for patients. One resigned and one was suspended. The CEO who had been overseeing them all resigned a week after the news broke.
Is this egregious Phoenix case an anomaly? In just the past few months, there have been similar stories in the news reporting incidents of sexual assault of disabled women, often at the hands of a caregiver. In several cases, the rapes were only discovered because the women became pregnant. In October, caregiver Divine Nde Momuluh, 39, was charged with sexual assault of a vulnerable adult after he impregnated a woman with intellectual disabilities at the Minneapolis group home where she lived. In late December, Rusty Lee Love was released on $50,000 bond, but not officially charged in the suspected sexual assaults of three developmentally disabled women for whom he was a ride-provider in Orange County, California.
Police are currently investigating whether there are other victims.
As these cases show us, women with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, are often perceived as “easy targets” because they may be more vulnerable to manipulation and have difficulty reporting the abuse. And the statistics bear this out. In 2017, 77 percent of incidents of rape and sexual assault were not reported to the 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 it to is the same person perpetrating the assaults (and on whom they are dependent for their most basic care), the number might be perilously close to 100 percent. If non-disabled women are afraid to report their sexual assaults for all the reasons we have become familiar with, how are the most vulnerable women in our society expected to report?
According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), disabled women are at greater risk of being sexually assaulted than other women and are far less likely to be able to get help because they “tend to have lower educational, financial, professional, and social success than both non-disabled females and their disabled male counterparts. Because women with disabilities are more isolated than most under-represented groups, their plight typically has not been addressed. Women with disabilities, therefore, warrant unique attention when examining abuse and violence.”
This means that every aspect of the disabled woman’s life might be controlled by one or more caregivers and there is literally no way for the victim of sexual assault to tell anyone because she has no access to outside intervention. In the Arizona, Florida, and Minnesota incidents, the pregnancies alerted authorities to the rapes. But how long had those women been being victimized? And how many other women might have been preyed upon by the same, or other, caregivers who have yet to be caught?
HRW says disabled women are subjected to forced sex with workers, caretakers, or other residents of group homes; being beaten, slapped, or hurt; forced sterilization or abortions; being locked in a room alone; ice baths or cold showers as punishment; forced medication (i.e., tranquilizers); having to undress or be naked in front of other people; watching other people be abused or hurt; being tied down or put in restraints. The list is harrowing as it is egregious. If these things were being done to a non-disabled person, it would be considered torture. But these are common experiences for disabled women.
The most recent U.S. Department of Justice report on Crimes Against Persons With Disabilities released in 2017 cites the rate of serious violent crime, including rape or sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault, of people with disabilities as more than three times the rate of assaults on people without disabilities. One in five violent crime victims with disabilities said they believed they were targeted due to their disability. Women are the most frequent victims with at least 60 percent reporting abuse.
And there are 27 million American women who have a disability, with a full 50 percent of women over 65 who have at least one disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The DOJ uses the term disability to include limitations such as sensory (vision, hearing), cognitive, self-care, and ambulatory or mobility limitations.
A year-long investigation in 2017 by NPR News’ Joe Shapiro, in partnership with the DOJ, led to a series of reports that aired last January on “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” revealed that people with intellectual disabilities are sexually assaulted at a rate seven times higher than those without disabilities.
Toni Lewis’s* mother was among the statistics. Lewis placed her mother in a long-term care facility after her mother’s early-onset Alzheimer’s when they could no longer care for her without help. Lewis, whose partner is a social worker, said the couple had visited several facilities and finally chose one that was a manageable distance from their home “so I could check in on her and visit a few times a week,” and had the services required for dementia patients.
“Mom goes in and out,” Lewis says about her 68-year-old mother. “She’ll be perfectly lucid and having a conversation with you and then she just forgets where she was in the conversation and even in physical space. We had to move her out of our house because there was no one to watch her during the day and there had already been an incident with the stove being left on and another where she was found wandering in our neighborhood. We couldn’t risk her being hurt.”
Yet that was exactly what happened within her first six months at the nursing home. “Everyone gets the occasional bruise,” Lewis says. “But it seemed Mom was getting a lot of bruises. On her wrists, her upper arms. When I spoke to the nurse about it, she dismissed it as ‘normal from bathing and dressing’ and said some medications made older women more prone to bruising.”
One evening while visiting, Lewis was helping her mother into bed and she saw bruises on her mother’s thigh. When she reflexively reached out to touch them, her mother began crying, and saying, “no, no, no” and rocking back and forth. “I felt sick,” says Lewis. “I went into the bathroom and threw up in the sink. I was pretty sure I knew what had happened and I both couldn’t believe it and didn’t know what to do about it.”
Advocates for the disabled say that most people do not know what to do about sexual assaults in nursing homes and long-term care facilities, especially for victims who cannot speak for themselves. Many victims like Lewis’s mother don’t have the capacity to explain what has happened to them because they have memory problems or limited to no speech. They also may have difficulty understanding or conveying time sequences and thus cannot describe when something happened to them.
Link to rest of extract in next post.