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While society seems anxious to secure a ‘better deal for the handicapped emotional and sexual fulfilment. We either deny that they have natuf relationships. As the extracts from this report show, the handicaps in a reasonable and rational way.
‘Sex isn’t really something that comes up here at all They’re too bound up in themselves to bother about relationships with other people.’ ‘Of course we want to get married, yes, and have children as well. Don’t you see, we have to? Just because we’re handicapped, it doesn’t mean that we haven’t got the same rights and feelings as everyone else.’
The first speaker is the warden of a home for physically handicapped people; the second a girl in the same home, half of one of six couples whom, she says, feels the same way as she does. The gap between them is the difference we non-handicapped see between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Public attitudes fear & disgust? There is something fundamentally disturbing about the idea of handicapped people having the same urges and desires as the rest of the population. Whatever the reasons, we manage to think very little about sex and disability. When we have to, the feelings about handicap that we may usually be able to conceal can come to the surface. ‘In his encounter with society’, says a woman with severe rheumatoid arthritis, ‘the invalid rarely meets active dislike or disgust. But if he ventures into the world of love, such feelings are not far off’. A young man severely handicapped and bound to a wheelchair, recently married to a non-handicapped woman, tells of a couple down the block from them referring to him as ‘that gentleman we’ve seen you with’ when they meet his wife?the word ‘husband’ is too strong for them. Acquaintances try put a martyr’s crown on her?why else would ‘such a nice girl’ have taken on such a man?
Ambivalence
Handicapped people meet all sorts of ambivalence in their contacts with the normal world?particularly when their own problems of adolescent adjustment are raging most strongly. A spastic girl probably speaks for most physically handicapped people when she bitterly remembers a young man trying to get off with her: ‘It was going fine until he noticed the chair; then I could see his eyes turn off’. Yet she also remembers, as do others, the men who assume that somehow they are easy sexual game, simply because of their handicap, and who seem genuinely surprised when they show normal rejection of the approach.
So, on the one hand, handicapped people are out of the ‘normal’ sexual and emotional running. On the other, they are invested with sexual appetities and needs beyond convention. The myths we hold about their sexuality and its expression echo the same sort of paradox. On one hand, we deny that these needs exist, and make no provision for them. On the other, we invest the handicapped with exaggerated sexual demands, from which we and they must be protected. Either way, we ignore their humanity.
The myth of sexlessness
The views of the warden at the beginning of this report can be echoed up and down the land, in institutions for the mentally and physically disabled, and among the people who come into contact with them. Severely mentally handicapped men may experience a two year delay in the onset of adolescence, which they never catch up; severely mentally handicapped girls may begin to menstruate later than the normal population, but the pattern is normal once established.
But this evidence does not indicate that severely mentally handicapped people do not have emotional Ann Shearer e seem less than anxious to allow handicapped people the right to *eds or we create institutions which discourage the formation of close *ve emotional and sexual needs with which society has to come to terms needs; their heterosexual relationships with each other may not always be on a level that would mean much to the normal observer, but they are still important to them. In Sweden, where mentally handicapped couples are often allowed to live together within institutions, it seems that their needs are not so much for full sexual fulfilment as for gentler emotional expressions?kissing, cuddling, sleeping together and warmth.
The myth of sexual irresponsibility
It is still widely believed that mentally handicapped People are uncontrolled and perverted in their sexual appetites. In the past, this belief has been one of the main incentives for shutting them away in segregated institutions. Yet it is segregation which has fed the myth. They have been separated not only from normal emotional patterns of life but also from heterosexual company; it is our ‘treatment’ of their needs that has been perverted?not the needs themselves.
The myth that handicap must breed handicap
The misconceptions about inherited physical handicap must give way in the light of genetic research. But the mentally handicapped still carry their institutional inheritance and the myths that led to their segregation from society.
But it is not necessarily true that mentally handicapped parents have mentally handicapped children. ?nly four of a sample of 1,280 mentally handicapped People were found to have severely handicapped Parents. After summarising the various estimates of the proportion of handicapped children born to handicapped parents, one authority concludes that somelhing like 30% of them will be either severely or mildly handicapped. But it is important to realise that the large majority of defined forms of mental handicap are not inherited, and that estimates of handicapped people at any time depend on what society at that moment is calling ‘mental handicap’.
Making the myths come true?
Popular beliefs about the sexuality of handicapped people are as mythical as the beliefs in the danger that their sexual emotions and feelings constitute to society.
In our provision for disabled people, we still deny them both knowledge about their own sexuality and the means of expressing their needs. As a result, we can sometimes encourage the myths about their behaviour to become realities. Having created the stereotypes for our own comfort, we can force people to live up to them. Mentally handicapped people who are denied any normal emotional expression may well develop odd forms of behaviour. Residents in institutions for the physically handicapped?particularly when these depend on charitable funds?say that, because there is an assumption of asexuality in the running of the place, they feel forced to fall in with it and suppress their own emotional and sexual needs. By ignoring the needs, and hoping that they will go away if we do not talk about them, we can also deny handicapped people the knowledge on which a balanced emotional development can depend.
Denial of knowledge
Heads of centres for physically handicapped young people report that those who come on from special schools are even more ignorant about the physical and emotional facts of life than those who have been in ordinary schools. While sex education is pretty slight for most children in Britain, the handicapped?particularly those in special residential schools?will have even less opportunity to find out for themselves than non-handicapped children of the same age.
The adolescent
The young handicapped person may find him or herself stuck in a kind of adolescent limbo. ‘Where circumstances prolong the period of economic dependence, postpone marriage, or disallow sufficient emotional separation from the parent, then the position of the individual as an adult, no matter what his age, is apt to be tenuous and, like that of the adolescent, marginal between adulthood and childhood. He may well continue to experience conflicts with parental authority resulting from such marginality, to feel devalued as an incomplete adult, and to show inconsistent, exaggerated, and emotional behaviour typical of conflicting overlapping situations. It may very well be that the fact of disability in many cases tends to prolong the adolescent period.’ Sex education
Whatever the theories, the fact remains that for most handicapped young people the chances of realistic sex education and emotional guidance are pretty slim. Staff concerned with them will often refuse to enter this tricky arena, while complaining at the same time about their ‘immaturity’ in courtship, their lack of ‘decency’, or understanding of what is properly private behaviour and what is not.
Results of ignorance
Recent Swedish work shows that much of the emotional and behaviour disturbance that mentally handicapped young people can show in adolescence may come from simple misunderstanding about what is happening to their bodies?which can develop into fear if not properly explained. A young boy, for instance, thinks his wet dreams mean he has started bed-wetting?and that, he has had it well dinned into him, is wrong. A girl can find menstruation upsetting.
Living apart
Mental and subnormality hospitals are generally rigorously segregated although there are now, in mental hospitals, some ‘experimental’ mixed wards in which patients of both sexes can usually share occupational and leisure facilities.
Where this has been tried in a couple of so-called ‘family units’ men, women and children may mix by day but must separate at night, with even the small boys returning to the ‘male side’.
Staff attitudes
While the bricks and mortar of residential institutions can militate against the development of personal relationships between residents, the attitudes of staff can be even more important.
A request to talk with staff and residents of a home for the physically handicapped about its emotional life brought a flurry of embarrassment. ‘Now’, a member of staff told the assembled bunch of residents, ‘you’re going to talk about you-know-what, and you’re all going to be frank and honest about it’. The embarrassment was entirely on the staff side, for one thing that emerges clearly is the gulf in attitudes between older staff and their young residents.
The generation gap
To an extent, this moral gap between generations is noticed throughout society. But in a situation where staff and residents must necessarily be on terms of unusual intimacy because of the residents’ handicap, its effects are likely to be magnified. The prevalent staff attitude towards sexual expression appears to go something like this: ‘Of course we think it very important that they should be free to develop emotional relationships?it’s a normal need, after all?so long as they don’t do more than hold hands’.
Effect on residents
Among the residents, certainly, there are complaints about staff attitudes. ‘They treat you like children, never take you seriously.’
It is perhaps hardly surprising that in such an atmosphere the residents may start to live up to the pattern of behaviour the staff expect of them. It is particularly hurtful when their emotional attachments are not taken as seriously as they would want them to be, when their adolescent ‘engagements’ are laughed at; perhaps, again, it is not altogether surprising that these relationships have a ‘coarse and comic quality’, in sheer self-defence.
Frustrations and solutions
The frustrations that can develop out of segregated living in institutions for the mentally handicapped are perhaps more serious, because the means of getting round restrictions may be too difficult for some residents to master, and because their segregation from each other is more total. The Swedes have found that an adult living in a single sex institution becomes childish, egocentric and aggressive; there is a great deal of open masturbation.
In mixed institutions, where residents have not only their own room but their own basin and lavatory, or share them with only two or three others, behaviour has improved. Residents have become calmer and more considerate of each other. Adults are allowed to live together, with women on the pill, and homosexual friendships are not frowned on; open masturbation is now no problem.
The old behaviour problems are replaced with some jealousy and hurt feelings?the ‘normal’ hazards of an emotional life. But the staff find it quite possible to work through these problems with the residents.
What emerges clearly is the explosion of myth; given the chance of emotional expression, mentally handicapped people are neither grotesque nor uncontrolled in their appetites.
All we can say is that, where both sexes are allowed to spend their days together, even the most severely handicapped will find a serenity and calm in their relationships with each other, even if the only outward expression of their feelings is merely an occasional touch. But mixed facilities of this sort for severely handicapped residents are very rare.
Marriage
Residential centres for both the physically and the mentally handicapped could do a great deal more than is sometimes the case to help their residents learn the sort of physical skills that are needed for running a home.
Children?
Most physically handicapped couples will want to know their chances of having a handicapped child, and they should be able to get the genetic advice on which to base a rational decision. They will also have to decide whether or not they can cope, financially and physically, with a child. A disablement income provided as of right would ease the problems of handicapped people considerably and, for some, would make having a child a real possibility.
The children of handicapped parents
Children of severely handicapped parents may have emotional problems which could lead to a need for counselling. In a study of 18 couples in which one or both of the parents was blind, it was found that 15 families had some difficulties. These could not. however, be blamed on blindness alone. A spastic man, with normal speech but a very clumsy walk, married to a non-handicapped wife, tells of the quite severe emotional problems this brought to his children. The son, from the time he started school, wanted to avoid being seen with his father in public; in time he refused to bring his friends to the house, and the strained relationship between the two wasn’t brought into the open, and its problems resolved, until the son was virtually grown up. The daughter did badly at school, and had migraines, although always affectionate to her father; again, it was not until adolescence that he discovered how hard she had been fighting for him against girls at school over the years, and the deep emotional effect her loyalty to him in keeping quiet about it had had.
Fulfilment?
‘I love him, I’m satisfied’, says a mentally handicapped wife. ‘She’s happy, so am I’, says her husband. ‘That’s all we want?a nice house with a bath in it. Then you can come home and have a nice bath and go straight to bed in a clean bed. We’re happy.’ Clearly not all handicapped people will reach full emotional expression. Some will be too handicapped to marry or to have children. Others, like some of the normal population, will not find anyone they want to marry.
But is this any reason to deny them knowledge of their own sexuality and opportunities of emotional development?
‘A Right to Love?’ is available from the National Association for Mental Health, 39 Queen Anne Street, W1M OAJ or from The Spastics Society, 12 Park Crescent, London WIN 4EQ. Price 14p including postage.
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