In 2019, physical restraint of disabled people is still a thing

Illustration from Captive and invisible

By Louise Kinross

A couple of months ago I wrote down 'physical restraint and seclusion' as a story idea. But when I looked at it on the list, I kept hoping there would be a reprieve. 

Instead, every time I went on social media there was a new horror story about disabled children and adults who were restrained, physically or verbally abused, or locked in a school isolation room, hospital, assessment unit or 'care home' for adults. 

Yesterday, I read Captive and invisible. It's a series of stories about disabled people who are locked away in hospitals, institutions and private homes. It was produced by the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities. One of the stories is about people in Ghana, for example, who are sent to prayer camps, to be healed, where they are shackled and live in horrendous conditions. Catalina Devandas Aguilar, the UN expert, discusses the series here.

The selection of stories, such as the one in the image above, suggests that the problem is in developing countries. "Amil is autistic, and he lives in a rural village with his family," is the text that accompanies it. "They have no help, and there are no services in the community, so he spends all his days and nights locked up in a room."

But this isn't just happening in low-income countries. It is happening in Europe and the United States and right here at home in Canada.

Last month, the BBC aired a shocking investigation into a British home for adults with autism and intellectual disabilities. The home, funded by the National Health Service, is referred to in the British press as a 'specialist hospital for people with learning disabilities,' which is the term used there for intellectual or developmental disability.

A reporter went undercover as a worker and filmed her colleagues taunting, intimidating, degrading, provoking and repeatedly restraining patients. They bragged about times they'd assaulted patients, like banging a person's head against the floor. Then it was revealed that patients had reported bullying by staff in an inspection report in 2015 that was never published. Last year, the home was bought by an American multinational company. What interest, other than monetary, could a U.S. multinational have in a British hospital for people with intellectual disabilities? Ten staff members were recently arrested.

A similar case in New York City came to light five years ago in a home for adults with developmental disabilities dubbed the "Bronx Zoo" by staff. But despite an investigation that found staff at the state-run home smacked, pushed and punched residents, New York State officials who tried to fire 13 employees for abuse or neglect were unsuccessful.

According to an article earlier this week in The New York Times, the workers were shielded by the state arbitration process. In addition, The Times found that over one-third of employees statewide found to have committed abuse offences at group homes and other facilities between 2015 and 2017 were put back on the job.

Which reminded me of my own son's experience back in 2009, when a school staff member, angry because he picked a butt up off the ground in a park, and pretended to smoke it, dragged him across the playground and pushed him into his wheelchair. He had a dislocated hip at the time. Other staff reported this person, but the principal didn't deem it necessary to call me until 24 hours later, when she asked if my son had told me about an 'incident.' No, he doesn't speak, he hadn't, I said. It wasn't until that night, when I asked him about it, that he signed the story to me. He never would have told me otherwise.

The staff member was sent home, the police were called, and I was asked to check for bruises. I was told that the staff member would never be in a class with my son again. Imagine my surprise, then, when the following year, this same staff person turned up working at the mainstream school my son had transferred to. And had the nerve to approach, and talk, to my son. So I had to call the principal and read him the riot act that this person was to have no contact with my son.

Only two days ago, this piece in The Globe and Mail summarized the Canadian practise of physically restraining or isolating, in locked rooms, children with autism or other disabilities who "act out." Sheila Bennett, a professor at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont. was quoted as saying she was horrified to hear about a plan to build more seclusion rooms in Ontario school districts. "When an isolation room exists, it becomes a viable alternative for behaviour and inhibits our ability as experts and educators and compassionate people to find solutions that work better," she said.

In April, a British teenager with autism and mental health problems who had spent two-and-a-half months in an isolation booth at school, a variation on the isolation room, where students sit in cubicles in silence and have no direct teaching, tried to kill herself. Her mother said she was unaware, for months, of what was happening.

I'm not an expert, but how could any educator possibly imagine that a child with autism and anxiety would blossom sitting alone in silence?

Just yesterday, I read a post in a closed Facebook group for parents of children with disabilities where a local parent asked if a school has to document every time a staff member physically restrains her child. She'd been asked to pick up her young child in the morning, and it was only after he was in the car that she learned that a teacher had put him in a hold. 

A teacher can restrain a child in a physical hold, and not tell a parent about it?

In 2019?

In another Ontario online group a parent spoke about how her adult son with autism has spent months in a locked psychiatric hospital because there are no options for him to live in the community. And she knows of a handful of families in similar situations.

Last week the photo below was tweeted by many British parents to show what it's like for a parent in the U.K. to visit their autistic teen who is locked in an inpatient mental health facility. 

How did being held like a criminal become an accepted practice for disabled children and adults in our schools and hospitals and group homes?

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Collective advocacy must replace mother-led campaigns

By Louise Kinross

A decade of activism by British mothers of children with disabilities hasn’t produced positive change in the lives of disabled people, write two researchers in a fascinating article this month in Disability and Society. The authors—Katherine Runswick-Cole and Sara Ryan (photo above)—are disability studies scholars and parents to children with intellectual disability. “Despite the efforts of countless mothers of disabled children, and others, over the last 10 years, the outlook remains bleak,” they write. “We live in a world now where our children with learning disabilities will die on average 23 to 29 years before their peers (NHS England 2017), startling evidence of the limits of advocacy for, with and by learning disabled people.”

We interviewed Sara in 2015 about the preventable death of her son Connor Sparrowhawk, an 18-year-old with autism and seizures. In 2013, Connor drowned alone in a bath in a National Health Services treatment unit. The NHS trust that ran the unit initially attributed his death to natural causes, but his parents called for an independent investigation that found his death preventable. Last year, Southern Health in Britain was fined just over $1.8 million dollars for this preventable death.

Sara and Katherine, who are at the University of Oxford and the University of Sheffield respectively, argue that campaigns based on mother advocacy have failed for generations. Yet every new generation, not looking back, insists they’re pioneers in the cause. The authors suggest we need to move away from mother advocacy—which is undermined by a culture of mother blame, focuses on individual families vs. systemic problems, and pits mothers of young children with disabilities against mothers of adult children—to a new collective activism that brings all sorts of people together.

BLOOM: You note that many parents of children with disabilities believe that the general public just doesn’t understand the discrimination their kids face, and that if only they were made aware, changes would occur. But you don’t buy into that. You say you’ve been doing this work for 10 years and conditions in the U.K. for people with disabilities have only gotten worse.

Sara Ryan: Yes. There was a good chunk of solid policy in the U.K. at the beginning of the 21st century that engaged with learning-disabled people as human beings who we need to value, and who have aspirations. That positive movement has come to nothing. Things have gone backwards.

Ten years ago, we thought we were pioneers in raising awareness and we’d sort everything out. We didn’t realize the generations of parents and mothers who had done the same things we were doing. We disempowered the people who came before us.

BLOOM: You point to something I’m very aware of—which is a split between young parents of kids with disabilities and older parents of adult children, who have been advocating for a long time. I know when my son was young, I didn’t want to hear about the experiences of adults with disabilities because I wanted to focus on his unlimited potential. I wanted to believe we had the capacity to make big changes.

Sara Ryan: As young parents you’re totally fresh, and you think things won’t be as bad for your children.

BLOOM: In a way, you don’t want to hear about the real struggles of older parents.

Sara Ryan: I understand that. You’re facing something unexpected and unfamiliar, and you have a lot to grapple with. But it’s really unhelpful in terms of social movements and change if the movement is inherently fragmented when people break off when their children go into adult services.

BLOOM: It’s so short-sighted, to turn our backs on the families who have done the hard work before us.

Sara Ryan: It’s also sustained by big charities who almost 'groom' the younger parents to make them feel they’re pioneers in leading the way. These charities have been saying the same things for 40 years, and it’s not in their interest to say it hasn’t worked. They present their campaigns as something new for parents of young children, while erasing the work that’s been done in the past.

BLOOM: I guess promoting a campaign that focuses on young children—and the sense of possibility inherent in them—is more likely to be well received than one that focuses on the realities for adults.

Sara Ryan: Young children are cute. But there’s a change happening with young mothers today. There’s one mother on Twitter who posts a photo of her young son with Down syndrome beside the facts about the early death he faces. She wants people to think about that, and it’s really powerful.

BLOOM: You talk about mother blame in your article—whether we’re blamed for our child’s disability, or blamed for not doing enough or the right therapy, or blamed because our children are costly. How does mother blame influence the efficacy of social justice campaigns by mothers?

Sara Ryan: That’s an interesting question. In our original paper we were saying that mothering is an invisible endeavour, but by token of having a disabled child, your mothering becomes visible. You’re seen as a poor mother due to your child’s unruly behaviour.

When we began our campaign #JusticeforLB [LB stands for laughing boy, a name Sara used in her blog about Connor], there were attempts by the trust, the local authority and NHS England to blame me, or to cast me as an irrational mother, to diffuse the strength of our arguments. But what was unique about our campaign was that over time, the demand for answers became a collective endeavour by a diverse range of people. Most had never met us. That reduced the potency of the 'mother being the problem,' so our campaign was very effective.

BLOOM: You refer in your article to a new form of advocacy called unmothering. Can you explain?

Sara Ryan: It’s about loosening that expectation that the child and mother bond is somehow essential, and allowing other people to step up and be involved in a campaign—to take part and speak and act. If the campaign is just about a mother, it’s an individual focus, which is necessarily weaker.

BLOOM: You write that unmothering doesn’t devalue mothering, but disrupts ‘the idea that the mother alone is responsible for raising children.’ How was the #JusticeforLB campaign an example of unmothering?

Sara Ryan: It was the collective approach of it. We ran a campaign within the campaign called 107 days of action, to mark every day Connor had been in the unit before he died. We asked people to adopt a day to fundraise for our legal fees, or to raise awareness. We had a teenager who canoed 100 km to the House of Commons with a photo of Connor on her back. We had a Brownie pack in New Zealand that drew pictures of buses, which Connor loved. We had people who did lectures or sports events in Connor’s name. People adopted a day to do cake sales. These activities had nothing to do with mothers, and in most cases they were undertaken by people who didn’t know Connor or our family.

BLOOM: How did you get people who weren’t personally invested in your family to participate?

Sara Ryan: I’d been writing a blog about Connor, and early on it was really funny stories about the hilarious things he did. By the time he died, so many people were reading the blog, which was anonymous at the time, that they felt they knew him. That made the impact of his death more powerful. He wasn’t a learning disabled person. He was a fully fleshed out member of our family, and he was very funny. The fact that he was a beautiful young man with funny stories was what took hold.

BLOOM: Yet you note that storytelling by mothers hasn’t traditionally produced results.

Sara Ryan: I think stories are important, but I don’t think they make change. The Disabled Children’s Partnership recently launched a new campaign called #TheSecretLifeOfUs to raise awareness of the challenges faced by families. But the campaign is premised on the mistaken assumption that the lives of disabled children are hidden.

BLOOM: Yes, you note that children being excluded from school and bullied, and the isolation and poverty of families, has been well documented.

When Connor died, the NHS trust first blamed his death on him, saying he had died of natural causes. Then they shifted to criticizing you.

Sara Ryan: A day after Connor died, a document called a briefing on the mother’s blog was produced and circulated, which suggested that I might be troublesome because I’d written that Connor had had an earlier seizure. Blame is completely at the heart of it. The biggest example was before Connor’s inquest, our solicitor read transcripts of evidence given by staff. They said things like ‘My relationship with Dr. Ryan: I was very scared of her. She was unusual.’

BLOOM: As opposed to staff testifying as to why it was that Connor ended up behind a closed door in a bath where he had a seizure?

Sara Ryan: I had said to staff ‘Connor is having seizures.’ It kept coming up in the inquest that the defence for each of the staff members was that the mother was so difficult it was impossible to provide good care to Connor. When Connor was in the unit I wouldn’t have dared to be angry, for fear of retribution. We were so worried about Connor.

Read the annual reports of the British Learning Disabilities Mortality Review.

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How does having a disabled neighbour 'dash your dreams?'

Families protest the Weyburn, Sask. decision to keep a small group home out. This photo is from CBC News

By Louise Kinross

I’m embarrassed.

This isn’t the Canada I know and love. But apparently, according to two recent news stories, it is.

Last night I read about how the city council of Weyburn, Sask. rejected a home for four adults with disabilities in a new subdivision called The Creeks.

Four people!

According to this Toronto Star story, there was “tremendous pushback” from residents who’d bought expensive homes in the neighbourhood. “It kind of dashes the dreams and hopes of the people that live there currently,” said Coun. Brad Wheeler at a council meeting on Monday.

Just how, exactly, does having a person with a disability living on your street dash your dreams?

Oddly, the Star story includes a photo of the Weyburn sign welcoming people to what it calls “the opportunity city”—just not for the people waiting for the small group home that was tossed.

The developer of The Creeks supports the home.

This story played out as Ryerson disability scholars spoke to CBC Radio about a Nova Scotia human rights inquiry that found the government discriminated against three people with intellectual disabilities by locking them away in hospital psychiatric wards, for no medical reason, for years. When the complaint was launched in 2014 they were still living in hospitals.

“The conditions of their life were described as soul-destroying,” said Esther Ignagni, an associate professor in Ryerson’s disability studies program. For example, one person was locked in a room with a television for 23 hours a day.

The Nova Scotia applicants argued that the province should have provided them with the supports to live in the kind of small group home that Weyburn, Sask. residents just snubbed.

However, Walter Thompson, chairman of the Nova Scotia inquiry board, rejected the argument that timely placement in a small group home is a human right.

According to the CBC radio interview, there are 1,500 other disabled Nova Scotians waiting for such a home.

He also rejected the idea that ableism was behind the lack of community options.

Ableism is the “idea that disabled people are not valuable or vital parts of our society and it’s permissible to send disabled people away and …lock them up,” said Eliza Chandler, also an assistant professor in Ryerson's disability studies program.

Doesn’t the first half of that description perfectly mirror the attitudes and actions we see in Weyburn, Sask.? 

“These people have invested a lot of money into their dream homes, their retirement homes and to have the provincial government come in and pick a lot directly across from them, I don’t think that was the best choice,” Wheeler was quoted saying.

Chandler was asked what a world without ableism would look like. It would be “accessible and inclusive of disabled people and would value us as citizens and want us in your cities, in your town and as your neighbours,” she said.

Meanwhile, here in Ontario we're told the wait for a group home placement for adults with intellectual disabilities is over 20 years. I have been told, by a person at the end of the Developmental Services Ontario line, that it doesn't happen until someone in an existing home dies. 

I think Canadian kids need a new word on their spelling tests: ableism.

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