Ukraine, disabled people and the war

Last Tuesday the BBC showed a 24-minute documentary, Ukraine’s Stolen Lives, about the treatment of people with real or apparent learning disabilities in Ukraine’s ‘orphanages’ and other institutions and how this has dramatically worsened during the war. The documentary showed people living confined to bed, people assumed to be unable to communicate when they in fact could, and institutions which were closed to the outside world where hardly any of the residents received visitors. They interviewed managers of some of these places; some had seen a lot of their staff just leave when the war broke out as well as large numbers of new residents arriving from areas directly affected by the war. Many of the places had farms onsite and grew a lot of their own food, but the residents were neglected and some were painfully thin as a result. A few years ago a much longer documentary was broadcast, Rejected: Ukraine’s Unwanted Children, which can be viewed on YouTube, which showed people living years of their lives in institutions because of disability, particularly learning disabilities, often prevented from leaving because they were subjected to guardianships.

While some of the problems affecting disabled people in Ukraine are certainly the result of the war, others are clearly the result of long-term neglect. This is something that has been observed in a lot of institutions in many countries; a few years ago, similar things were seen when international disability activists went to Greece and filmed in some of the institutions there. There, the problems were exacerbated by the economic crisis, but it was also clear that neglect and bad practice had been going on for decades already. Human Rights Watch have produced a number of reports on the treatment of disabled and mentally ill people in various countries: Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil among others. There are common themes: that people are locked up in cages or chained to their beds or to trees, and that people with physical impairments are forced into institutions for lack of help with home care. In some African countries, institutions were run by faith healers who were often abusive; illness or disability was put down to the effects of magic and people were subjected to exorcisms. The US has tolerated an abusive “troubled teen industry” running boot camps and prison-like schools across the country for decades as well as places like the Judge Rotenberg Center while in the UK, life expectancy for people with learning disabilities is many years shorter than the general population, and people with autism in particular often find themselves trapped in closed institutions, forced to mix with convicted criminals and subjected to the same rules as they are, and kept their for decades because psychiatrists are never quite sure they are safe to be let out or because there is nowhere suitable for them in the community. There isn’t the sheer neglect in the UK that we see in Ukraine or some other places, but there is as much cruelty.

This did not stop some of the British viewers of this week’s Ukraine documentary using it as reason why we should not support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, however. People compared the situation to the Romanian orphanages that were seen on TV after the fall of the Ceausescu regime in 1989. “What a shitty country,” I saw someone (with a “Free Assange” hashtag on her profile) say on Twitter, who also told me “if that was China you and others and especially the BBC would be flipping your lids”. I have actually seen documentaries about abuse or neglect of disabled children in China, albeit many years ago. But China isn’t being invaded by a powerful neighbour — China is actually the powerful neighbour that occupies two of its neighbours and threatens another — and the reason we are supporting Ukraine is because it is facing an unjust, brutal invasion and occupation by a country which is a notorious hotbed of criminality and corruption. Its treatment of disabled people, incidentally, is at least as bad as Ukraine’s.

The situation in Ukraine is not as bad as it was in Romania, which was the result of the Ceausescu regime’s policy of harassing the population into having more children than they wanted (not only were contraception and abortion banned, but women were subjected to intrusive surveillance and examinations until they had produced five children). But a country should not need to be paradise to be supported in fighting off an aggressor; after all, no country is paradise, including our own, much less Russia. If we care about disabled people in Ukraine, we should support their country’s freedom as we have a better chance of freeing disabled people from institutions and helping people who care for them in an independent and free Ukraine than we have in Russia, or would have in a Ukraine occupied by Russia, an increasingly closed country and a police state.