Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Again and again.

[bookgirlwa]

Couple carry out campaign of sadistic abuse

Just something else to echo in my brain when I have to listen to some dipshit tell me that "No one would ever hurt a child with a disability", or, "But their (your) parents must love them (you)".  Denial like that enables horrors like this to happen.  It's ironic, or just fucking infuriating, when you

Comments

[ginamariewade]

Actually, the literature shows that children with disabilities, especially psychiatric problems, are more likely to be abused than other children because they are disabled and are therefore more difficult to parent. Not an excuse, but an explanation. It doesn't make it OK for them to do it, but it puts their actions into context.
The literature also shows that the vast majority of abusive parents are not sociopaths or psychotic, but are ordinary people with poor anger control and poor impulse control.

People do monstrous things to children. Just when I think I've heard of the most fucked up thing I can imagine happening to a child, something else comes along that's even more fucked up. But these are not monsters doing it - they are ordinary people.

[fierceawakening]

are more likely to be abused than other children because they are disabled and are therefore more difficult to parent.

But if you are having difficulty dealing with something, you get help or support or find someone else who can do it. You don't resort to violence.

It's shocking and sickening to me how people respond to these things happening with "well, but of COURSE people aren't going to have the patience."

As if our dignity depends on their patience.

Nope.

[ginamariewade]

I think you're misunderstanding me

[fierceawakening]

People with disabilities are so often told we just need to understand how frustrating it is to deal with us. We're told that violent and cruel behavior isn't abuse, but simply someone "running out of patience" because dealing with us is so hard.

Coming home and telling our parents something hurt us, and getting "Well, I'm sure so and so is frazzled. There's not much in the county budget for dealing with you" rather than "What happened? What did she do? How long has this been going on? You seem withdrawn -- what's happening?" makes me very leery of The Patience Defense.

Part of what I want and I suspect many others I know want too is for people to stop hiding behind the idea that we just need to understand how many of you are frustrated. Why ask children to be patient with abusive parents and caregivers, rather than asking where the patience of the abuser is?

[gillpolack]

In other words, why ask the abused child to be perfect and self-sacrificing, when the abusive parent is not held to those high standards?

I think a lot of excuses are made and every single one of those excuses slides past the fundamental truth: disabilities are aspects of a person's life, not the whole soul. A parent's responsibility for the emotional well-being of a child with disabilities is no different to their responsibillity for a child without.

I hate it when people confuse the baggage that some disabilities bring (and that has to be dealt with) with the person who suffers from that baggage. And living life from a wheelchair, or with co-ordination issues, or with speech impediments, are giving much more negative weighting than other types of baggage children have. If having a genius child isn't an excuse for abuse and having a child with a foul temper isn't, then having a child with other paricular needs most certainly isn't.

(Sorry about ranting - I feel *very* strongly about this.)

[fierceawakening]

Don't apologize. More people need to hear it.

[bookgirlwa]

I meant to reply to this ages ago, but it slipped my mind. Thank you so much for this comment, I really appreciated it, especially this: "In other words, why ask the abused child to be perfect and self-sacrificing, when the abusive parent is not held to those high standards?"

Spot on. Perfectly expressed. Thank you.

"(Sorry about ranting - I feel *very* strongly about this.)"

Ranting is always welcome in my LJ - unless it involves insulting the owner of said journal! - and I don't really want anyone reading or commented here who *doesn't* feel strongly about this sort of issue, if you get my drift.

[ginamariewade]

I'm not saying that the child was not abused. It absolutely was abuse, it absolutely was not her fault, and I don't want you to think for a moment that it was all right with me for it to happen. That doesn't change the etiology of the abuse. These parents did not, I think, wake up one morning and decide that beating the living shit out of their daughter would be a fun way to pass the time. It sounds like they were young, probably poor, they were not parented very well themselves, and they probably would been crappy parents to a child who was "easy," but their lack of skills was compounded by the additional challenges of a disabled kid. This was obviously not the child's fault. They obviously had poor parenting skills, they had some serious anger control issues and probably substance abuse issues as well. This was a tragedy that did not have to happen, and the interventions to prevent it could have been made a long time before it got to the point of irreversable damage to the child

[whimsicalzephyr]

I don't know...I think anyone who would force their children to live in a toilet and eat feces probably is a monster, and not just suffering from anger management issues. To do something like that means that abuser has zero empathy...which is often a symptom of being a sociopath.

[technogoddesss]

Ordinary people doing it--maybe that's why I try to put myself in their place when people do these things.