gimpled

There she is, that mouthy girl. Fines owing. And look at her – bashed, not looking good. She’ll probably be better off in lock-up, she’ll get a feed. 5pm, August 2. Click on the handcuffs, cold against her dark skin. She’s another number today. Three grand’s worth of driving fines, and jeez she’s a difficult one. Get her health check done, she’s off her head, probably on drugs. Or just behaving like they do, you know, a lot of them have behavioural issues. You gotta be firm with them. Fines, the last thing on her mind, between the beatings and the drugs and the fight for survival. And the lock-up door slams shut. Typing up the file notes. She appears to be suffering withdrawals from drug use, not coping well with being in custody. On the mattress, her burning skin hot against the blanket. Every breath drawn moves her fractured ribs, burns her lungs. 8am, 3 August. Into the health campus for the second time, bright white lights. Pointing to ribs, pain ...

Dear Destroy the Joint Last week, you told us that you apologised for excluding us from your page and from the ongoing conversation about violence against women. This is what you said; Dear Destroyers, Let us begin with a belated and unreserved apology about the way we have handled the comment moderation in this instance. We acknowledge we can always be more inclusive. We are constantly discussing ways we can achieve this and no woman living with disability should be excluded from this page. Anyone who has been banned as a result of this will be unbanned. Please email jointdestroyer@gmail.com so we can be thorough about this. It has always been our mission to include everyone and Counting Dead Women includes all women who have been killed as a result of gendered violence. We have left this post here, along with all the feedback so we could gain a better understanding of how the events have unfolded and how the way we have run the page may have contributed to it. We wan...

It is so frustrating. Destroy the Joint are counting dead women, mostly women who are killed by men. Destroy the Narrative are counting dead men, only those who have been killed by women. For both those groups, they are counting the people who have been killed 'this year'. But for many people with disability, nobody is counting. Nobody knows when we are dead. The story of an Autistic boy who was killed by his mother and stepfather - he was bound to a chair, doused with cold water and put in a garden shed, where he died of hypothermia - only went to court this month, in 2015. He had died in 2011. Rebecca Lazarus , a woman murdered by her partner outside her group home in 2007, also went unnoticed, uncounted for over five years. On the 14 November 2012, 1960 days after Lazarus was brutally murdered, the Coroners Court of Victoria released its report, a “Finding Without Inquest”. Until then, nobody knew - and perhaps that was because nobody cared. Our deaths ...

When is a woman not a woman? When she’s disabled, of course. It’s been a sad week for women with disability who are battling for inclusion in feminist circles. But it’s nothing new. In 2013, Stella Young wrote an article about ‘The Politics of Exclusion’, in which she recounted a story of her contact with Destroy the Joint, a feminist group who aims to make sure women are included in public participation. Destroy the Joint had set up a website where people could take a pledge. It read, in part: I want an Australia where girls and women, where men and boys, can take part in our society without enduring discrimination, sexism and violence. I want an Australia where we respect each other; an Australia where no person experiences hate because of their gender, race, religion or sexualit y. And I will challenge anyone who uses sex, race, religion or sexual orientation to incite hatred or to demean or vilify any of us. I will not stand by and let others do so without speakin...

This week, police interviewed a mother of a 16 year old Autistic boy who was found chained to a bed. She was later released without charge, and her son was returned home. And then it started. The media, the cameras and the comments on social media, many from members of the public who argued, ferociously, that although child abuse was 'never all right', the community should 'not judge'. Until you are this mother, a struggling Somalian migrant with five children, you cannot 'walk in her shoes'. You do not know what Autistic children are like, many of them declared - they can be violent, dangerous, and at least the boy would be safe chained to the bed. Really? In 2008, 16 year old Callista Springer died in a house fire after being chained to a bed in her home. She had tried to escape from the upstairs room, but the chains held her. Her parents were imprisoned, not for murder but for torture and child abuse - 18-50 years. This was Callista. But ov...

Do you stand to wipe? I blinked a little. Out of the blue, my charismatic 25 year old son was asking my friend this question, with all the charm that he could muster. The friend blushed. Of course not, she said, and my son carefully explained that he had asked hundreds of people this question, and the results were unexpected – almost half the group sat, the other half stood. And a few lonely souls put their foot on the toilet seat, meeting the others half way. We’re not comfortable with sharing our personal habits, and it’s only people like my lad who can (almost) get away with asking questions like this. Curious about how this subject arose, I asked why he’d thought of conducting this slightly odd research – he’d told his friends he had fallen over in the toilet whilst drunk, in the act of wiping. But why were you standing? one friend asked. And thus the Great Standing or Sitting Debate was born. It’s an amusing topic. Last night, I sat with some friends around a table ...

I don’t exist. Neither do many of my friends – specifically, those with disabilities. I discovered this recently when playing the Sims, a ‘life simulation video game series’, developed by EA Maxis and published by Electronic Arts. It’s one of the best selling video games of all times – it has sold more than 200 million copies world wide. There are fat Sims, black Sims, Sims with purple hair. You can tweak your Sim character until he is a morbidly obese black guy with a bad ass taste in goth fashion. You can add traits and characteristics to make your Sim charismatic, a good kisser, lucky – but you will never see one type of Sim in the land of the Sims. Yep, that’s us. People with disability. There are no blind Sims. There are no Deaf Sims. There are no wheelchair using Sims, and it is unlikely that you will be able to introduce learning disabilities or neurodiversity into the Sims’ basic makeup. When you google ‘disabled Sim’, YouTube will tell you all about how to u...