People With Disabilities, Sexual Abuse
27/07/2011
The Hon. K.L. VINCENT (15:42): I rise today to speak about something which has formed a large part of my work over the past few weeks but which is a tragedy so deep and far-reaching that I could not say that I have even begun to take in the full scope of it. Recently, I have been in contact with several families of people with disabilities who have been sexually abused. While all of the families and victims involved are different and have a different story to tell, there is a common thread: all of the perpetrators in these cases have been allowed to walk free.
Of course, there are varied reasons why each separate case did not end up in a conviction and, because there was no guilty verdict, we cannot say for certain that the investigators were centred on the correct person. But we do know, in some cases from medical evidence, that these people were abused and degraded and that there has been no justice for them. Instead of justice, what these people and their families have is fear, sickening worry and a profound sense of betrayal.
I want to talk through the levels of failure which have led to this sordid and heartbreaking result. Our community fails to protect people with a disability on every level, from education on rights to admissibility of evidence. Let me start at the start of a person with disabilities’ life. Most of us, when we are young, are given the tools to know our rights. Our parents and teachers explain to us what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. They tell us of our right to feel safe and our right to have our own feelings and to act on them.
Naturally, this learning extends into the realm of sexual knowledge. From a young age, we are made aware of our sexual organs and given information about what is and is not appropriate so that we may avoid and speak up about things which are inappropriate. There are a few reasons why kids with disabilities miss out on this vital information, but I do not have time to go through them all, so here is the most heartbreaking reason I have heard.
Some kids who communicate differently—that is, who use a picture board or a machine translator because they do not have the capacity to sign or speak—are not taught these things, because there is no vocabulary to teach it to them. This is to say, some communication machines or communication boards literally do not contain the words ‘penis’, ‘vagina’ or ‘sex’, so there is no way to communicate with a child on these issues and no way for the child to talk about them. I hardly need to explain how much danger this lack of knowledge puts these kids in.
So, that is our first failure: education. Here is the next one: understanding. The police, in particular, have little understanding of, or even interest in, learning to work with people who have a disability. For front-line officers there is only a tiny bit of training about disability; it is a module which is delivered online. I would hardly say that a few weeks of training filling in forms online qualifies you to communicate effectively with anyone, let alone someone who has autism, for example.
The police tell me that they have a special unit which can be brought in for particularly difficult cases. This would be reassuring but, unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the special unit will be used; that decision is often made by the front-line officers who, as I have said, do not have the training to really make this decision. So, even when the big guns are brought in, there is little chance that a person with disabilities is going to be given the best chance to tell their story. According to SAPOL, this minimal nod to working with people with disabilities is comprehensive and inclusive—and this is an attitude that they should be ashamed of.
Yet another place where we fail members of our community who have disability is in court. Courts understandably have strict rules about what evidence is and is not admissible, but there is no effort to laterally present the evidence of a person with disability so that it might meet the standards of admissibility. Too often the testimony of a person with disability is overlooked because there might be difficulties with cross-examination or because an intellectual disability is deemed to make someone unreliable. There has to be a way around these perceived problems. I am no legal expert, of course, but I do know that children and women were once considered unreliable witnesses, too—and society seems to have got over that prejudice, so we should take steps to get over this one, as well.
We are failing the victims of sexual abuse on every level. We are failing to educate them and arm them with the tools of self-protection. We are failing to have compassion and understanding and to respect their differing ways of communicating, and we are failing to respect them enough to give them their day in court. By now, you would have realised what this all means: it means that it is open season on abusing people with disabilities. It is high time we stopped this sickening cycle.
