Abused/Traumatized Characters in Fiction

I see a lot of people portraying trauma and abuse poorly in fiction. Here are some of the common problems:

With Good Guys:

• Very Little Effect - a prime example is Harry Potter. He's got a big advantage over Voldemort because he's 'full of love'. Where did he learn that love? From his parents? They died before he could remember him. From the Dursleys? They abused and neglected him and made it pretty clear that they hated him. From teachers or classmates? Until Hogwarts, none of those people cared about him either. For a boy with the unpleasant life history he had, Harry Potter was surprisingly healthy psychologically. A more common example is how little the story's events usually affect the characters. There are people they know dying all the time, they face their own death on several occasions, maybe experience torture, but they still act like a carefree kid a lot of the time. To get an idea of what living through those kinds of things is really like, talk to anyone who's lived in a war zone (soldier or civilian).
• Instant Healing - this is where a character has some kind of trauma, and for 10 years or whatever, they've shown a certain dysfunctional pattern as a result. Yet one transformative experience cures it overnight. A few stories stretch it out awhile, but very often it's still too brief. Or maybe they've recently experienced something traumatic and are showing symptoms, but something helps them deal with that and they instantly go back to being who they were before the trauma. Well, guess what? Healing from trauma is long and hard. You'll go through a great deal of pain, you'll come back through the same stages over and over, and maybe, years later, you'll finally be able to consider yourself to have healed. Only to realize you've still got wounds. And when you finally are healed, you will not be like you were before the trauma, or would have been without the trauma. It's not possible to undo something that happened to you, all you can do is integrate it into your life experiences in a healthy way. A series that portrays this really well is The Hollows by Kim Harrison - one of the major characters is a vampire who's experienced some pretty serious abuse, and throughout the series, she is gradually healing. As of the latest book, she's still clearly got issues, but she's not nearly as prone to unexpectedly attacking people as she was at the start of the series.
• 'Good Guy' Trauma - This is another thing Kim Harrison managed to avoid. A lot of characters, if they actually seem affected by their traumatic experiences, show it by depressive episodes, bad dreams, acting scared of certain things, etc, but never in a way that could actually make them likely to harm someone else. Sure, there are some traumatized people like that, but there are also traumatized people - who have good intentions, and are basically good people - who have explosive rages, misinterpret situations in a dangerous way, and so on. My Dad said when he was growing up, everyone knew not to take certain veterans hunting, because they'd start thinking they were back in the war. It's easy to feel sympathetic for the person sobbing xyr heart out because xe never realized just how much xe wanted the motherly love xe never got. It's much harder to feel sympathetic for the person who has pinned you to a wall and is demanding that you prove that xe can trust you, but that's just as much a part of being traumatized.
• Normal Standards - one of the most pervasive and damaging effects of trauma is how it changes your view of the world. But so many characters seem to be perfectly aware that what they went through is not OK or representative of what they can expect from life, even when they really had no way to find that out. An abused child who never got any sympathy from anyone for being abused, yet somehow knows that what they went through was abuse is a prime example. Real abuse survivors often blame themselves for not being able to cope, or being 'bad' and making their parents hurt them, or not being able to stop the abuse (my cousin seemed to think it was plausible for a 4 year old boy to be able to beat up his own father). Or they may think the abuse had no effect on them when it clearly did, or think the effect was positive. Then there's how they view the abuser. It's possible for an abused person to honestly care about their abuser (part of what makes it so agonizing). They may be able to see the good points in the abuser as well as the bad - if the abuser is a parent, for example, they probably did some things right in order for their child to even be alive. They may be aware that the abuser's life isn't easy either, and feel sorry for them. They may have been so dependent on the abuser that they had to care about the abuser or else they wouldn't have survived.

With Bad Guys:

• Dark Lord Was Abused - this is where the bad guy is given a backstory of abuse as a replacement for actually trying to explain xyr behavior. There are two big problems with this. Firstly, it often carries the connotation that abused people automatically become bad, especially if there are no other abused characters. Secondly, the standard villain types often don't act like abuse survivors. The biggest thing is that they have too much fun. If you're going to make them an abuse survivor, make them unhappy. It seems obvious to me, but there's the gleeful cackling evil guys with histories of abuse to prove that people can miss this. Thirdly, it still doesn't explain why they act the way they do. Let's say a boy grows up with regular beatings and no one who really loves him. Why would that make him decide to create a doomsday device? You can't just say 'because he was abused' and leave it at that. You should work out the chains of logic there. Maybe he thinks every child suffers as much as he does, and feels that he's doing them a favour by killing them all because they won't have to suffer anymore. Or maybe he wants to destroy all the people who've wronged him, views the whole world as having wronged him because no one stepped in to help him, and thinks everyone deserves to die. Or maybe he isn't really trying to destroy the world, but hoping that making this device that could do that will get everyone to finally see how much pain he's in and force them to care about that. It has to make sense from his perspective, however warped that perspective is. Best if you can get people to empathize with him and really feel sorry for him, even as he's putting the whole world in danger.
• Abusive parents - if you're going to have any development of the abuser whatsoever, you need to make them have more depth than just being bad guys. What they're doing to their victim makes sense to them. They have reasons for doing it. Maybe they snap under too much pressure or when their buttons are pushed certain ways, and then feel terrible about what they did. Or they honestly think they're doing the right thing (see 'Normal Standards' above for why an abuser might believe that). Or they might not care about the child or want to hurt the child - but I recommend limiting that, because it seems to me that most abusive parents actually do love their children.

Solutions to Self-Advocate/Adult Autistic Issues

A lot of autistic self-advocates criticize the mainstream autism community for focusing so much on children on the spectrum, rather than arranging for help for the serious issues that adult autistics face. It's a matter of focus - on children and cure, as opposed to adults and support.
But it seems like many autistic self-advocates (myself included) do the same thing we criticize others for.
A couple of events made me realize this. First, for quite awhile, I've been a volunteer expert at AllExperts in the category of autism. And I've easily handled many questions from parents of autistic or possibly autistic kids, discussing issues such as how to get a kid to stop playing with spit and how to tell if your 9 week old is autistic without much difficulty. That's the typical sort of questions I get, showing the same kind of focus that autistic self-advocates criticize in parent-run autism organizations.
But one question I got was something I really struggled with. An autistic person was kicked out of his home, living in a salvation army hostel, and asked my advice. I hope my answer helped, I think I did fairly well, but it was really hard. I had to do a bunch of research and pondering and try to figure out if the organizations I was reading about would do anything to help him. This wasn't an easy answer to write like all the parent questions.
Recently, I was reminded of this by a question that struck the same feeling in me. This one was posted on several autism listservs I frequent. An autistic woman who lives in a group home is currently being threatened with going to jail for having what appears to be a relatively minor autistic meltdown. She didn't hurt anyone, yet they're calling her violent. And I don't know how to help her, what to say to her.
We use stories like these in our activism, to show why more support is needed, but when we are called upon to help someone in a situation like that, what do we do? We don't know how to help, we don't know what to do. We don't have the easy answers like we do for parent issues. And that's at least partly because even as we criticize their focus, we let it direct our focus. So we don't think as much about how to help these people no one seems ready to help.
It seems to me that not only are your beliefs about various issues important, but so is what you choose to discuss. And so often, the curebies successfully direct conversations about autism to their issues, their focus, and we don't fight that well enough.
So I'll do the research to see if I can help this woman. I'll try to at least direct her to someone who can help. And in general, I'll try to find, or make if I can't find, supports and solutions for these issues.

Letter to Tony Attwood About Cassandra Syndrome

Here is a letter I just sent to Tony Attwood:

"I have read that on October 22-23, 2008, you will be speaking at a conference about marital relationships and Asperger Syndrome, including a discussion about 'Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder'. The inclusion of NT spouses of AS individuals, but no married AS individuals, on the panel is especially problematic.
I hope you will make it clear that marital problems are not solely the fault of one person simply because they have a neurodevelopmental disability, and that intolerance, failure to understand and failure to accomodate differences on the part of the neurotypical spouse is a big source of problems as well.
Except in cases of spousal abuse, marital problems are always the 'fault' of both partners. Asperger Syndrome causes social differences and other differences, but unless the AS partner has co-morbid abusive tendencies (which are probably equally common in AS and NT people), the AS diagnosis does not mean they are at fault for the marriage breakdown. There are many AS/AS marriages which do just as well as NT/NT marriages. The problems that AS/NT marriages can have (which are not universal or insurmountable) are that the two partners have a very different way of relating. This is no more the fault of one partner as opposed to the other than a communication breakdown between two monolingual people who speak different languages. They simply do not understand each other.
Due to negative experiences, AS partners may be more likely to be very sensitive to criticism and have low self-esteem, but NT partners are more likely to be prejudiced against their partner's cognitive style and be less able to compensate for neurological differences (AS individuals have a lifetime of practice).
For an NT/AS marriage to work, both partners must work to understand and accept each other, as well as ask assertively for what they need in the relationship. Blaming relationship problems solely on one partner, as the Cassandra Syndrome concept does, will not help that. Very often, the AS person is already exerting much more effort to accomodate their NT partner than vice versa."

Religion and Morality

I remember reading a story by a Christian woman who had an ADHD son. At one point, she said that she'd read that ADHD kids were more often abused, and she could believe it, because if it weren't for her religion, she'd have abused her son.
As an atheist, I was deeply offended. If that's really true of her, I'm glad for her son's sake that she's a Christian. But I don't need to be afraid that some diety will punish me in the afterlife to avoid hurting a child. All I need is an awareness of how my actions will affect that child. The thought of breaking that child's trust, betraying that child and the pain it would cause, is enough to make me think I shouldn't abuse that child.
There's this stereotype among many Christians (and probably people of other religions) that you must be religious (preferably the same religion as them) to be a caring person. I could point at the religious people who do terrible things - the sexually abusive priests, the people who ran the Inquisition, etc - but many people claim those aren't really doing what God wants. Instead, I point to the people who don't sin, who in fact do good, but only because they want to be in heaven instead of hell. How moral is it really, to act good only for a reward?
If I knew for a fact that I'd go to hell if I didn't torture and kill a child, I would hate the God who set that rule, and feel that the moral thing would be to disobey Him. (I can't promise I would disobey him, but my idea of an ideal person certainly would.) But in the Bible, God allegedly told someone to kill his favorite son, and the man was about to carry it out when God said the equivalent of 'just kidding'. God was 'testing this man's faith', apparently, and the lesson is to trust that God knows best even if you really don't like what he's telling you to do. I'm not willing to give anyone that kind of power over me. (Certainly not the ordinary human beings who claim to speak for God.) I don't think someone so easily led into disobeying their own beliefs is a good person.
And those people who avoid doing something they want to do only because they think they'll get punished - they often don't really avoid doing it. They do it in secret, or they do borderline things which they excuse by emphasizing the differences (or simply deny). The first is not feasible if you really believe you've been told what to do by an omniscient being, but the second option is very likely to be done by devout believers who obey only because of heaven and hell.
So maybe that ADHD boy was being abused after all. Not by being hit or made to do sexual acts, but by his mother's looks, her comments, her rules, her body language. If a child has been taught, by their parents' behavior, that they are bad and don't really belong in their family, then they have been abused - even if such teaching is not deliberate. And you can't avoid that abuse just by thinking you'll be punished for it. You avoid it by cherishing your child, by working with yourself to avoid feeling so angry with them, by learning to enjoy being with your child.
Sadly, it's considered normal for parents to dislike spending time with their children. My father is excited when he has time off work to look after us. My mother misses us if she goes away to a conference without us. But recently I saw a joke in which a 6 year old boy who had two older brothers was asked what his mother did all day since he entered school, and said 'cartwheels' (turning cartwheels out of joy, because she doesn't have to look after him all day anymore). Children are considered a burden, worthwhile mainly because we grow up into 'real' people and can look after our parents in their old age. Parents say 'I wish you have a child just like you someday, so you know what it's like' and mean it as a curse instead of a blessing.

Letter To a Kid Like Me

Here's something I wrote awhile back. It's what I wish someone had told me when I was 10-12 years old.

Don’t let them tell you you’re not OK. You’re a wonderful person - everyone’s wonderful, even if they’re hurt, even if they do bad things, even if they don’t think they’re wonderful. You need to remember that. Use that knowledge as a shield between you and anyone who tries to hurt you, or says you need to be someone else.
Try to remember you’re not the only one fighting this. You may be surrounded by people who all seem to want to tear you into pieces and rebuild you as someone totally different, but chances are there’s someone on your side. You may not have even met them yet. Keep looking.
You’re not the only one in the world like you. There’s others whose minds work in similar ways, who understand how it feels like you’re an alien in human morph[1], like you look just like everyone else but inside you’re totally different. There’s a name for how you’re different. You may not even understand what’s so strange about you, but there’s still a name for it somewhere, and someday you will find out what it is. You’ll learn what kind of person you really are.
And it’s not your fault if you feel powerless, if you can’t avoid something bad. It’s not your fault if they threaten you and you give in. But fighting back can help you hold on to your power, can help you hold on to yourself. And if you figure out the right way to fight, you can help someone else. But remember, you don’t need to put yourself through more than you can handle to fight the wrongs of the world. You need to learn to take care of yourself as well. You need to find someone you can trust, someone you can be vulnerable around without them hurting you.
Don’t punish yourself. They’re punishing you too much already, and it’s not fair. You need to respect yourself, and love yourself instead of hating yourself. It’s OK to make mistakes. You don’t have to be perfect to be an OK person. You don’t have to know everything to be proud of your mind, and you don’t have to be good at something to like doing it. Don’t let them kill your love of things by making fun of how you do them. Find your own way to enjoy them.
Remember to love yourself. You need to take care of yourself. You’re not selfish if you need things. And there’s more than one right way to do things, doing it differently isn’t the same as doing it the wrong way. You don’t have to do it their way, even if you only want to do it that way because they say it’s wrong. And don’t be afraid to be yourself even when others will think the wrong thing. If they can’t kill you, then you’ll survive, and the only danger is that they’ll damage your self. And the only way to fight that is to be yourself.
Love yourself. It’s not your fault. You don’t have to be serious all the time, don’t let them take your fun away from you. Being silly is not a betrayal of the pain people are going through, it helps you cope. Don’t feel bad if you react the ‘wrong’ way, as long as you care about other people’s pain it’s OK to react in a strange way. It’s OK to laugh from fear if that’s what’s natural for you. It’s OK to find things funny even in the midst of awfulness.
Don’t let anyone tell you you’re a bad person. Everyone is valuable, everyone has some good in them. No one’s perfect. Normal isn’t perfect, in fact you may have noticed normal has some problems with it. But they can be fixed by nice normal people who like diversity. And it’s OK to be white even though white people have done bad things to the other races. Racism isn’t unique to white people, and it’s not counter-white to be nonracist. Same goes for any other difference.
Don’t be afraid to seek help. You can’t fight the world alone, find the people who can help you fight the good fight. Find someone who’ll get angry on your behalf when you are hurt. It can help remind you that you don’t deserve to be hurt.
[1] When I was around 9 years old, I was obsessively interested in a book series called Animorphs, in which five kids get the ability to turn into animals from an alien.

Abuse: Disability Blog Carnival #36

Alright, I've got a lot of interesting (and sad) posts for this one.
Laurie Toby Edison describes the use of allergies for bullying. The victim is a girl severely allergic to peanuts. To get her to stop sitting with them, a group of girls all brought peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It's a very shocking case, and her take on it is quite interesting.
Kay Olson describes an experience she had with institutional abuse. There are three aspects of this story that are quite important to highlight: firstly, the attitude that doing her job is an annoyance and unduly burdensome (reminiscent of the description of answering call lights in My Contaminated Smile); secondly, the power to deny the opportunity to communicate, which is such a big issue in the lives of assistive communication users; and thirdly, the 'catching' someone doing something they said they needed help with, something I've experienced as well. Another important aspect of her account is the reasons she didn't report it to that woman's superiors. She was afraid she'd be left in the care of a woman who not only was abusive, but who had a grudge against her in particular because she got in trouble with her boss.
David Hingsburger talks about a movie he's been involved with regarding the sexual abuse of developmentally disabled people in a group home. This movie has an important aspect of education, because it vividly shows the steps involved in reporting abuse.
Cusp describes the feelings evoked by the rejection of her application for DLA. Many of these I can relate to, even though I haven't been in that particular situation. When I was signing up for the disabled youth group I belong to, the form asked what I needed assistance with, and I was at a loss. I'm so used to just struggling on my own with the things I struggle with, telling no one or only my family. I finally told them that I tire easily from physical activity, that I have no sense of time, and that I find it hard to navigate by bus, but with each of those, similar things ran through my head. "But after all, I manage don't I?"
Athena, The Integral and Ivan describe their definitions of abuse. Much of this sounds like abuse from the environment, not from other people (although The Integral's stuff certainly is). An interesting idea. Does that meet the definition of abuse?
Bev describes the point of autism awareness. Another, more recent post I stumbled upon on her blog just now is a humorous description of how we need a cure for autism awareness. She discusses Donor X, a sperm donor who has fathered several autistic kids, and how, despite the positive view of autism that one of the parents has shown, the sperm bank removed his sperm. Not just identified it, added a marker stating he's had many autistic kids - they removed it. Can't have those people, even when one of his children has incredible memorization, reading, math and musical ability.
Casdok didn't submit a blog post, but she shared with me a comment posted on her blog (which she'd deleted):

“C isn't special to the rest of the world, he is only special to you. He is a burden to the rest of the world and if he was another part of nature, like an autistic fish for example, would have died long ago. You just use others to keep him alive.
And C is not the kind of high functioning autistic that will ever contribute anything to mankind. But that's okay, if something happens to you they will just control him as they wish with drugs, like you should have allowed them to in the first place. He is not a complete person, he is an autistic that shits all over everything. Get over it.
You made him, put on your big girl panties and deal with it, and stop being so self centered."

Well, that's certainly abusive!
She also makes an interesting comment: 'abuse stems from ignorance.' I wonder about that. I may blog about it later.
Dorry Carr-Harris at the Torontoist discusses an art exhibit about the history of disability discrimination. They presented 13 objects, including a closet with sixteen identical sweatsuits for institution residents to wear, a billboard listing 'four types of mental deficiency' and a bassinet belonging to a 'funny looking kid' who was given a digoxin overdose without her parents' knowledge.
Jeff McNair discusses the horrifying statistics regarding the rate of sexual abuse of developmentally disabled people, and the protective role the Church could serve. He says that ministers should watch out for this, and if they suspect abuse, they should report it. He also discusses the resistance to inclusion that he's encountered when doing activities with developmentally disabled group home residents.
Astrid asks the important question of whether you should pressure disabled children to achieve at a normal level in every area. She discusses reading speed for blind children - Braille readers tend to be slower. Her discussion reminds me of my old post Milestones, in which I argue that a disabled person's achievements should be celebrated based on how hard they were to achieve, rather than undervaluing milestones met later than normal (or overvaluing things which really aren't that hard).
William Peace discusses rich priviledge and a quadriplegic man who can afford state of the art technology and all the best care, and doctors are 'amazed by his progress'. It reminds me of all these people who pay enormous amounts to cure their autistic children, while moaning about the economic burden and ignoring the families just struggling to survive, who have trouble keeping food on the table, much less getting expensive therapies. Another thing I've noticed is the 'perfect lives' phenomenon - if practically everything's gone in your favour for most of your life, as soon as something doesn't, it's an absolute tragedy. The parent quoted in A Work in Progress said that having a developmentally disabled child must be 'every parent's worst nightmare'. Tell that to a refugee mother. Hey, you could even tell that to my mother, who found out her daughter was getting sexually abused in her own home. Clearly, if you think developmental disability is 'every parent's worst nightmare', you have led a sheltered life.
Shiva submitted an excellent post called The Thing Itself is the Abuse, about the common pattern of portraying 'misdiagnosed' people who were abused in a way common for the group they were mistaken as like their treatment would not have been abuse if they really were a member of that group. In my opinion, this is the best post contributed. I was going to give Shiva the blog award I'm supposed to pass on, but xe already got it. I've certainly noticed that as a problem myself. My teachers thought I had ADHD, and treated me badly based on that. Had I really had ADHD, if anything, it would have been worse, because their treatment of me would seem to me to be more 'justified'. In some cases, it is true that the misdiagnosis is the biggest problem (for example, a bipolar child misdiagnosed with ADHD will generally be given medication that is helpful for many ADHDers but induces serious manic symptoms, rapid cycling, and raging in many bipolar people) but it's really important not to assume that, or act as if certain categories of people are okay to abuse.
Knitting Clio posted an entry Good Cause, Bad Idea for Fundraiser about a 'Jail n' Bail' fundraiser for the special olympics. I'm kind of baffled by this. Where did that idea for a fundraiser come from? What did they mean by 'Jail n' Bail'?
Ruth posted about road rage against wheelchair pedestrians, clearly a terrifying situation for the pedestrian. Sometimes I really wonder about people, and road rage is one of those things I don't understand. I actually understand a parent killing their disabled child better than I understand road rage (note: understand is very different from agree).
The Goldfish will be hosting the next Blogging Against Disablism Day on May 1st, and has written a comment about terminology in preparation for it. And the next Disability Blog Carnival will be at cripchick's weblog. The deadline is May 4th, the carnival will be up on May 8th, and the topic is 'Disability Identity' - something I know I will be able to blog insightfully about, as this is an issue I've pondered a lot.
Lastly, I have my own comments. Firstly, I notice that all the posts seem to be primarily about real abuse of disabled people. Although this is an important issue, I'm a bit disappointed that no one discussed the following:

• things wrongly perceived to be abuse of disabled people, such as the belief that denying autistic, ADHD or other disabled children treatment to make them more normal is abuse; the attitude that it's abusive to deliberately have a disabled child, or even not take 'sufficient' measures to prevent their birth; and the assumption that if a disabled woman is pregnant, she must have been raped.
• stereotypes about abuse by disabled people, such as the belief that developmentally disabled men are sexually abusive (because they have 'animal urges' that most of us supress and they don't); the identification of certain disability-related characteristics as indications of a criminal or potential trouble-maker (such as the tale of a bipolar middle-eastern man who was mistaken for a terrorist, or the 'walking while developmentally disabled' crime that Amanda Baggs has gotten in trouble for); or portrayal of simply being exposed to a disabled person as a form of abuse.
• lastly, real abuse by disabled people (especially mentally ill/developmentally disabled abusers), how it is viewed, why they do it, and so on. A certain proportion of abuse survivors go on to perpetuate abuse (such as the autistic mother I heard about with seriously low self esteem who verbally abused her autistic child for being too much like her). Disabled abusers, if they abuse in ways society generally recognizes as wrong, may be more likely to be caught. They are also viewed differently, either as 'can't help it' or as much worse than a non-disabled abuser. And lastly, the existance of disabled abusers feeds into stereotypes regarding disabled people, and is used to justify abusive treatment of disabled people.

Regarding that last category, a study I found recently is relevant. They studied sexual abuse of developmentally disabled people by developmentally disabled or non-disabled men. Firstly, they found that almost half of the reported cases of abuse of a developmentally disabled person involved a disabled abuser. The disabled abusers were more likely to have abused men, more likely to have done sexual touch or masturbation instead of attempted or actual penetration and more likely to have done only a single episode of abuse. All in all, it sounds like they were probably much more often reported. Possible reasons are suggested by the fact that others had witnessed the abuse three times as often if the abuser was disabled, suggesting the disabled abusers were less sneaky when abusing others. Another fact is interesting: though the disabled abusers appear more likely to be identified, they were also much less likely either to be charged or have charges considered. Almost all of the disabled abusers either had no action taken, or in-service action such as warnings to staff working with them, whereas 'only' about 2/3rds of the non-disabled abusers were treated this way.

PS: Laura, the link you sent me seems to be broken, and I couldn't find the post by searching your blog. Sorry.

The Up-Coming Disability Blog Carnival Is Here!

Just a brief note. The next Disability Blog Carnival will be here. Deadline for submissions is April 21, the carnival will be put up on April 24. The theme is 'Abuse'. If you scroll down to the very bottom of my blog, you'll find the link for submitting, or you can email me by taking my blog's name (abnormaldiversity) and adding @yahoo.com to it.

Abuse is the Norm?

I recently came across a report on Violence Against Disabled Children prepared by UNICEF, and was shocked to hear them say that 90% of developmentally disabled people in one study had been sexually abused, and 80% of deaf people in another study.
I was not able to find the studies they got those rates from, but I found some other relevant studies. In the Journal of the American Academy for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry volume 333(4) pages 567-576, they studied developmentally disabled kids in a psychiatric hospital and found that 61% had been abused. In the Journal of Rehabilitation volume 68(1) pages 4-13, they studied disabled women (mostly physically disabled) and found that 67% had been physically abused and 53% sexually abused. In Augmentative and Alternative Communication volume 19(2) pages 125-134, 45% of AAC users reported having been the victim of a crime or abuse. In Sexuality and Disability volume 12(4) pages 297-306, they found that 27% of mildly developmentally delayed adults had been raped, as opposed to 4% of psychology students. They also found that most of the disabled study participants didn't know what incest and rape meant (the words were later defined before asking if they'd experienced it), didn't know what to do if they experienced unwanted touch or were sexually abused (the 'correct' answer was to 'respond assertively' or 'tell someone') and that 27% thought they couldn't say no to sex and 36% said someone else should decide for them whether they have sex or not.
With many of these studies, abuse survivors are actually the majority of disabled people. And in most cases, this is those who say they were abused when asked as part of the study. How many more who were unwilling to talk about it or didn't realize they'd been abused (for example, thinking what was done to them is normal)?
It's shocking. Think of this: it is more unusual for disabled people not to have been abused. I always assumed that having been sexually abused made me a minority, both in the general population and among autistic people. Though none of the above studies gave information on the rates of abuse among autistics, most likely the rates are fairly similar to other developmentally disabled people.
These studies suggest a much needed shift in perspective. You can't just assume they weren't abused until you find out they were. In fact, it may be safer to assume that they were abused, by someone, until you find out they were not.
I figured emotional abuse would be extremely high, near-universal, but these studies didn't look at emotional abuse. They looked at physical and sexual abuse and occasionally neglect. Even those more overt forms of abuse are extremely common among disabled people.

Whose Side Are They On?

According to many parents of autistic kids, at least those who know the history of autism, psychoanalysts were 'the bad guys'. Many also hail early behaviorists as heroes. Certainly, they were much kinder to parents. Bruno Bettelheim, in his book The Empty Fortress, said that the difference between Nazi prison guards and mothers of autistic kids was that the mothers got at the children from a younger age (Bruno Bettelheim was a concentration camp survivor, and appears to have drawn extensively from that in his work). In contrast, in an interview I found with O. Ivar Lovaas, he said: 

"I can tell you that the parents that we work with are very nice people. We get to know the parents as people, and when you do that you find that there is no reason to believe that they produce autism. But a lot of parents still think that it must be their fault somehow. They have heard that the parents of autistic children do not express love adequately, so they bend over backwards to be loving. What they get for their trouble is even more bizarre behavior � the child smears his feces on the walls, bites his parents, and has violent tantrums. The parents are afraid to punish them for these acts because they have been told that the child behaves this way because he feels unloved, so if you punish him you are only making him worse. But this is all nonsense. And this theory has made a lot of parents feel terribly guilty and made the autistic child get worse instead of better." 

It's obvious which attitude parents would prefer. But if I was an autistic child in the 1970s, I'd much rather receive psychoanalysis than ABA, even though it would be worse on my parents (though admittedly not all psychoanalysts were quite as bad as Bruno Bettelheim). Here's why: 

"You see, you start pretty much from scratch when you work with an autistic child. You have a person in the physical sense - they have hair, a nose and a mouth - but they are not people in the psychological sense. One way to look at the job of helping autistic kids is to see it as a matter of constructing a person. You have the raw materials, but you have to build the person." 

(Ivar Lovaas, in the above-mentioned interview)

In contrast, psychoanalysts typically viewed the autistic child as a person and assumed their behavior was meaningful and important in some way. Behaviorists consider behavior meaningful, but in a very limited and simplistic sense of receiving a reward of some kind, and they don't question whether abnormal behavior should be reduced. Psychoanalysts ideally hoped their patients would become normal, but they were careful not to remove important methods of self-expression unless the person had better ways of expressing themselves (and even then, they were careful about it). In general, the treatment was much kinder. Psychoanalysts worked on building connection and understanding the patient. With higher functioning, adult patients, this was generally sitting or lying comfortably while saying whatever came to mind - 'free association' - but with children, especially if they had limited verbal skills, it was basically play therapy. The book Dibs: In Search of Self is a good illustration of this with a boy who probably was autistic (they call him emotionally disturbed). Here's Lovaas describing how he treated autistic kids: 

"Spank them, and spank them good. They bite you and you just turn them over your knee and give them one good whack on the rear and that pretty well does it. This is what we do best; we are very good at controlling these kinds of behaviors. This is also the way we handle self-destructive behavior." 

"One day I was talking with her teacher and Beth began hitting her head against the edge of a steel cabinet. She would only hit steel cabinets and she would only hit them on the edge because, you see, she wanted to draw blood. Well, I think because I knew her so well, I just reacted automatically, the way I would have with one of my own children. I just reached over and cracked her one right on the rear. She was a big fat girl so I had an easy target. And I remember her reaction: She turned around and looked at me as if to say, "What the hell is going on? Is this a psychiatric clinic or isn't it?" And she stopped hitting herself for about 30 seconds and then, you see, she sized up the situation, laid out her strategy and then she hit herself once more. But in those 30 seconds while she was laying out her strategy, Professor Lovaas was laying out his. At first I thought, "God, what have I done," but then I noticed that she had stopped hitting herself. I felt guilty, but I felt great. Then she hit herself again and I really laid it on her. You see, by then I knew that she could inhibit it, and that she would inhibit it if she knew I would hit her. So I let her know that there was no question in my mind that I was going to kill her if she hit herself once more, and that was pretty much it. She hit herself a few times after that, but we had the problem licked." 

"We stay close to them and when they hurt themselves we scream "no" as loud as we can and we look furious and at the same time we shock them. What typically happens is this - we shock the child once and he stops for about 30 seconds and then he tries it again. It is as though he says, "I have to replicate this to be sure." Like a scientist. He tries it once more and we punish again and that is pretty much it. So we can cure self-destructive behavior - even long-standing, self-destructive behavior - in a matter of minutes." 

"How do you avoid having the child become afraid of you? Lovaas: That is a good question. No one punishes who isn't prepared to devote a major part of his life to that child. Nobody punishes a child who doesn't also love that child. As soon as you suppress self-mutilation you start building appropriate behaviors. You reward the child for doing other things instead of hurting himself." (It actually won't work - I lived with someone who was sometimes nice and sometimes mean and I was plenty scared of him.) 

Which would you prefer - someone playing with you and getting you to express how you feel, or someone hitting you, yelling 'No!' right in your face and zapping you with an electric shock device? Which would you prefer - being viewed as a person who is hurt and coping the only way they can, or as a physical person who is not a person 'in the psychological sense'? Psychoanalysis certainly had its problems, but it was by far better for autistic children than ABA.

What is Relaxed?

The current blog carnival theme is 'how do you relax, unwind'. I kept putting off writing my entry, because I wasn't in the right mood to think about relaxation. But I just realized I could talk about why it's so hard for me to relax.
Firstly, I have PTSD, and by definition, PTSD impairs relaxation. Having had something terrible happen to you makes you on guard for anything else like that. So relaxing is difficult, because I just don't feel safe easily.
In addition, society is constantly bombarding me, as a target of discrimination. When I'm reading, listening to the radio, talking with someone, or basically anything that involves receiving communication from others, discrimination can come up and hit me out of nowhere. And it does feel out of nowhere. If someone means to hurt your feelings or be cruel, usually you can see it coming. You're having an argument, they're angry at you, whatever. But if they assume everyone agrees, and rather than being deliberately offensive they are stating the truth as they see it, or even trying to be nice, then it comes in a friendly context, when you're starting to feel safe around them. And they might not even know I'm autistic, in addition to not knowing they're discriminatory.
So relaxing isn't easy. The few times I've felt what I think is called relaxed, it sneaks up on me. I suddenly realize that I feel safe. I often feel safe home alone with only my cats for company, but even so my triggers lie there lurking, able to shatter that calm. Sometimes I feel safe with my parents, but if they say or do the wrong thing I get triggered. Occasionally, I feel safe with my brother, but if he pesters me a bit too much that suddenly disappears. Once, I felt safe with people I'd only just met - a youth group of developmentally disabled people, among whom I no longer felt different. Feeling safe creeps up on me slowly, yet disappears suddenly.
When I realize I'm getting too upset and need to relax (usually late in the build-up of my stress), I don't know how to relax. What do I do? What is relaxation anyway? I honestly don't know what relaxation means or how to achieve it when I'm upset. Instead, I continue quietly teetering on the edge of meltdown until either something sets me off or (less often) I accidentally calm down somehow. I can't keep going on this way, I need to learn how to relax so I'm not constantly having meltdowns anymore.

The Virginia Tech Gunman was Bullied

I found this news article: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070419/ap_on_re_us/virginia_tech_shooting
I'm not surprised. Most school shootings appear to be done by someone who was bullied or otherwise mistreated in school.
Here's a wiki about school shootings: http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/School_shooting
And here's one about a kid who shot his principal: http://www.courttv.com/news/2007/0419/principal_ap.html
Here's one analyzing patterns in school shootings: http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2007-04-18-school-shooters_N.htm

It seems pretty clear that a risk factor for school shootings is school trauma.
In my opinion, risk factors for violence can be divided into two groups - experiences and psychological traits.
Experiences include abuse, school trauma and other traumas.
Psychological trais include violent fantasies, collecting weapons, obsession with death, and being full of hatred and powerlessness.
People like this need help.