Comments on: Guardianship and vulnerability

By: Axinar

Axinar — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 17:37:22 +0000

“I can remember discussions of whether my appearance alone was too vulnerable to be allowed in public by myself.”

You apparently have never been in the neighborhood where *I* grew up …

There, quite honestly, you’d be unsufferably boring … :)

By: Tricia

Tricia — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:19:10 +0000

I hope this isn’t too late or off-topic – when you said “There’s something wrong with conceiving of us as possessing the inherent trait of vulnerability, and conceiving of guardianship as the main solution to that now-presumed-inherent trait.” it made me think of Golda Meir’s famous words when there had been an outbreak of assaults against women at night. One polititian suggested a curfew for women. Meir suggested that since it was the men who were out hurting women, why not keep the men off the streets instead.

Similarly, just because you might be visibly vulnerable, why does that mean restrictions on your behavior? You’re not doing anything wrong, it’s the predators that are doing something wrong. Lock them up with guardians watching their every move and making all their decisions for them.

Saying that people who appear vulnerable* should live restricted lives because of what bad people might do to us is accepting evil as a fact of life and blaming the potential victims.

*This applies to pretty much any group that is regularly subjected to abuse by the dominant culture, whether it’s women, people with disabilities, or any other marginalized group.

By: David N. Andrews M. Ed. (Distinction)

David N. Andrews M. Ed. (Distinction) — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 22:16:36 +0000

“I also had a psychiatrist at one point who was convinced that if I got on the Internet I would be taken in by a cult that made people use pacifiers and diapers or something. And I do suspect it is a genuine threat to their control of the information we receive, to have all this information and all these people available to us.”

This happens here in Finland too. Psychiatrists are pretty poorly developed in the ego department, it seems.

By: Ettina

Ettina — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 14:30:07 +0000

In my case, I’m lucky that it doesn’t matter much to me. My parents long ago stopped making major decisions about my life without my permission, so it’s almost like they don’t have guardianship of me anymore anyway (I’m 17, so by vitue of being my legal guardians they can choose to do major stuff to my life without my permission, but I can’t imagine them actually doing that).
But when I imagine if someone like my grandparents (not counting my maternal grandmother, who died shortly after my mother became adult) sought guardianship of a disabled child of theirs, I can certainly see the danger. In my Dad’s family, he’s the most psychologically healthy sibling and the one who cut contact with his family. In My Mom’s family, two of her brothers moved as far away from the rest of the family as possible, and they are the only ones we’d be safe visiting (and we have visited one of them, but haven’t gotten enough money to visit the other).

By: anonymous

anonymous — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 13:11:14 +0000

Thomas Szasz referred to it once I remember as “the dignity of risk.” It’s how people grow.

By: elmindreda

elmindreda — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 04:08:05 +0000

I don’t think that guardianship was ever discussed for me, but I know that I had to fight the parent I lived with at that time to be allowed to move out, since I wasn’t considered to be capable of living on my own (I was). I certainly made some odd mistakes, especially in the beginning, but I both survived them and learned from them. This was before that parent had any idea of autism. With that, I’m certain it wouldn’t have been as easy for me to “get permission”.

By: zilari

zilari — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:09:22 +0000

Regarding the Internet thing: when I was about 11 years old I also discovered BBS systems, and found this to be a wondrous communicative experience. It was funny, though: people were concerned that I wouldn’t learn “real social skills” by being online, and yet, practically all the skill gains I’ve had over the past year or so have been due to reading stuff and communicating with people online (particularly autistic people).

And in response to the points made about vulnerability — though nobody actually applied for guardianship of me, there’s no question in my mind that I “looked” like someone who would probably end up with it eventually (particularly around junior high age). I am vulnerable as well in some of the same ways you are — especially the part about answering questions too readily and having difficulty with immediate, direct answers.

By: Yarrow^Amorpha

Yarrow^Amorpha — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 22:53:17 +0000

We kind of figured out after a certain point that every time someone said that something was dangerous for us or that we should avoid it because it would confuse us, because we didn’t have good enough judgement, because we didn’t really know who we were and were too easily misled, etc, it meant that we were getting closer to the truth about what we actually wanted and needed and our own most efficient ways of operating. And this apparently frightened people, so they’d rush in to tell us that we’d been misled, that we would just believe whatever anyone told us because we didn’t understand what we really wanted, that we had just been taken in by a slick presentation, etc, etc.

By: ballastexistenz

ballastexistenz — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 21:43:53 +0000

I don't know. I also had a psychiatrist at one point who was convinced that if I got on the Internet I would be taken in by a cult that made people use pacifiers and diapers or something. And I do suspect it is a genuine threat to their control of the information we receive, to have all this information and all these people available to us.

By: Yarrow^Amorpha

Yarrow^Amorpha — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 20:01:36 +0000

He was always telling me not to believe these people really existed or cared about me, or were even relevant to a life like mine. I am sure he would have patiently explained to all and sundry that they were, even if autistic, definitely not like me.

WTF is the deal with psychologists who try to convince you that the internet is this dangerous place, and that you must get off it at once? I really would like to know. The one who kept telling us “You need to get rid of that thing” wasn’t as bad as the one you described, and never told us that we wouldn’t have the same rights as other people when we were a legal adult or anything similar, but we had already spent enough years in therapy to ‘understand’ that whenever there’s a difference of opinion between you and the psychologist, they are always right and you are always wrong. So we tried to stay off it, but we still had this gut instinct that, actually, we should stick with this (this being the Internet) and that it was the way we were going to find “the others like us,” someday. We just had no idea how to express that feeling in words.

However, for a while, in the eyes of everyone around us, not just professionals, spending more than five minutes a day online was somehow dangerous and pathological. The best reasons anyone could give for *why* it was dangerous was because “those people online aren’t real, they aren’t real friends, your relationships with them mean nothing, and if you stay on the computer all day you’ll never learn to make real friends.” Never mind that 16 years had already gone by without these skills needed to “make real friends” materializing. And “people on that thing are not who they seem to be.” Never mind that we had previously been sexually assaulted by a “boyfriend” and neither seen it coming, nor realized he wasn’t actually our friend or to be trusted, even while it was happening. (Well, it didn’t help much that we had been given the oh-so-useful advice, in regard to assault scenarios, to “never fight back, no matter what.”) At least on the Internet, you can close the chat window. That’s not exactly an option when someone is holding you down. The whole concept that the Internet is vastly more dangerous than “real life” in this regard suggests a… very bizarre conception of how the world actually works. Finding out that the 18-year-old girl you were talking to is actually a 40-year-old man… really wasn’t even in it for us, as far as things which were actually scary or threatening went, and still isn’t.

Not to say we haven’t also gotten into some really pathological and destructive relationships with people online, but you kind of have to hold the door open longer in order to get into that, so to speak. And yeah, there were people who found this very easy to do to us by exploiting certain insecurities and conditioned reflexes of ours, at one point, but it would have been even easier for them to do offline.

In fact, one of the major ways we *learned* that we actually had the right to refuse to do certain things was through the Internet, and through people we met there, when we started to find people who could really confirm our perceptions of things for the first time ever. This might also fall under the category of “skills you couldn’t have learned if you had been too supervised,” in that after a certain point, our family stopped monitoring our online activity very much.

The interesting thing was that people seemed to be all wrong about the times we were vulnerable and what situations were vulnerable to us. The things that were seen as others in our life as “dangerous” (like the Internet) were the most helpful in allowing us to learn new things. The people like the boyfriend we mentioned often came across as “nice people” to everyone in our lives, and our having a relationship with them was approved of and condoned.