The ‘special’ schools that aren’t schools
Restrained and scared - the £100k schools failing vulnerable children (from BBC News) There has long been a section of the “special” education system in the UK that really made no attempt to educate;...
Category: Disability
Know-nothing managers, uncaring carers
Last week there was a report (here in PDF and .docx formats) published by the National Survivor User Network, a mental health advocacy group run by people currently in or who have experience of...
Rosie Jones: Am I a Ret*rd, reviewed
This documentary by the comedian Rosie Jones, about the online abuse and trolling she received a lot of on account of her disability, has been the subject of a lot of debate in the...
What is ‘snitching’? When is it bad?
Earlier this week the blind YouTuber Anthony Daniels (right), whose channel is called Third Eye Visions, did a video on ‘snitching’ and on whether it is OK to inform on bullies or on people...
Muslims, parents and nursing homes
The last couple of days there has been a big row on “Muslim Twitter” about people putting their elderly parents in nursing homes and whether that makes them bad Muslims or ungrateful children or...
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...
Travesty of justice, travesty of science
I recently bought and read the autobiography of Jennifer Msumba, an autistic YouTuber, musician and film-maker who lives at a group home in Florida who spent seven years at an institution in Massachusetts, the...
This scandal has already broken
“It’s a massive scandal just waiting to break” (Morning Star, 6th Jan 2022) This article, by the feminist writer “Dr EM”, most of whose articles are on fringe feminist websites, attempts to expose the...
Autism, female diagnosis and trauma
Yesterday the feminist psychologist Jessica Taylor (of Why Women Are Blamed For Everything fame) made a series of tweets about the rise in women being diagnosed with autism and ADHD and suggested that it...
Time for legislation on disability and late abortion
Last week the High Court in London rejected a suit from a woman with Down’s syndrome, Heidi Crowter (right), to overturn an aspect of the abortion law in the UK which allows a baby...
On imposing medical treatment without consent
The other day the Muslim scholar and blogger Musa Furber published a brief article on his blog answering claims from some Muslims that Muslim authorities do not have the right to impose medical treatment...
The wrong time to end the mask mandate
Yesterday, the government announced that most if not all the current rules and restrictions aimed at preventing the spread of Coronavirus, including the requirement to wear masks in enclosed public spaces and to keep...
Conservatorship is a disability issue
A theme I keep coming across in discussions of the Britney Spears conservatorship case is the presumption that she is in this predicament because she is a woman. Yesterday I came across a meme...
“Have you tried boarding?”
The other day a parent I follow on my social media, whose autistic daughter has been out of school for much of the past several years, mentioned a programme that was on Radio 4...
How we still let our learning disabled down
A couple of weeks ago there was a documentary on BBC1 that exposed how, in the 50s and 60s, young Black children were routinely sent to schools for the “educationally sub-normal” because of the...
Burning your child’s past
Last night I saw a thread on Twitter from an individual called “Autismomum” in which she talked of burning the documents about her child’s school life in case they were discovered by the child...
Not expensive
Yesterday a report into the death of a partially-sighted man, Cleveland Gervais, who was hit and killed by a train at Eden Park station in south-east London last February was published by the Rail...
Inquest travesty
This week the inquest into the death of Thomas Rawnsley, the young man with Down’s syndrome and autism who died in 2015 in a privately-run care home, Kingdom House, where he had been placed...
A tax on progress
Today it was announced that the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, was considering introducing an online sales tax, citing such reasons as a need to “protect the high street” from fears about coronavirus...
Putting the NHS on a pedestal
Last night, for the third Thursday night in a row, people came out of their front doors to clap in support of NHS workers and carers. For the first time, as far as I...