gimpled

Two years ago, I sat with my mother while she died.  She’d been dying a long time.   Our family is touched with what we call the ‘gypsy curse’, the BRCA2 gene mutation which affects about one of every forty individuals with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.  Lots of our family members have died – most of them, horribly.   My aunt sat with her mother as she died and she told me that she remembered her screaming upstairs, her body encased in plaster as the cancer spread from her breast and raged through her body.   Upstairs, like a dirty secret, she said.  My mother sat with that same aunt.   She took a long time to die, too.   My mother and a second aunt died within months of each other – my aunt from vulva cancer that had metastasised from her breast, my mother from bone cancer.   It followed years and years of surgeries, mastectomies, one after the other, a hysterectomy, treatment and surgeries and medication until finally when I...

In the disability sector, we’ve long since struggled with the issues of violence, neglect and abuse. Traditional violence prevention and response services don’t do disability well.   If you’re white, non disabled and living in a metropolitan area, you have a reasonable chance of accessing vital frontline services.   But if you don’t fit that profile, you’re likely to be left – sometimes literally – out in the cold. Disabled people who are experiencing violence and abuse often hear ‘we’re not funded to do that’.   We hear it from the disability service providers, whose core business is to care and support, not send victims or survivors of violence on endless referral roundabouts or to inaccessible dead ends.   We hear it from the underfunded refuges and domestic and violence services, who deal with an endless queue of non disabled women and don’t believe that disabled people are their business.   It’s long been a barrier to disabled people, especially ...

In the disability sector, we’ve long since struggled with the issues of violence, neglect and abuse. Traditional violence prevention and response services don’t do disability well.   If you’re white, non disabled and living in a metropolitan area, you have a reasonable chance of accessing vital frontline services.   But if you don’t fit that profile, you’re likely to be left – sometimes literally – out in the cold. Disabled people who are experiencing violence and abuse often hear ‘we’re not funded to do that’.   We hear it from the disability service providers, whose core business is to care and support, not send victims or survivors of violence on endless referral roundabouts or to inaccessible dead ends.   We hear it from the underfunded refuges and domestic and violence services, who deal with an endless queue of non disabled women and don’t believe that disabled people are their business.   It’s long been a barrier to disabled people, especial...