March 20, 2009
Return of an Outrage
After five decades of observing, I thought it was over. I had hoped we would never again see headlines like the one dated March 18, 2009 on NPR.org: Abuse at Texas Institutions Is Beyond ‘Fight Club.’ The article described events in which staff members were charged with taking part in staging “human cockfights,” using residents with mental retardation for staff entertainment. Chronicled on a lost but retrieved cell phone, the evidence pointed to more than a year of staged late-night fights, some as recent as this past January, at the Corpus Christi institution.
My rekindled anger took me back to the 1960s, to revelations that changed my life. The first experience was made more real to me because of my son Billy, who has Down syndrome. I had just begun pursuing my goal to become a special education teacher. I wrote:
During that first summer, my class visited various facilities supposedly designed to educate children with mental retardation. A major event was the trip to Partlow, a residential institution operated by the state of Alabama. . . As a group, we walked into one expansive barn-like room, furnished with two long benches facing each other, no other furniture in the room, no curtains on the cloudy windows, and absolutely no stimulation of any kind. I stopped in the doorway, mesmerized by boys appearing to be around the age of ten or twelve, hands by their sides, staring blankly about them. This image was my nightmare for months to come, an image still present in my mind. I was so struck with the horror of “nothing to do” that I swore to myself, “That will never happen to my little boy.”
The second event occurred as I was progressing in my studies in mental retardation; I was shaken and outraged by the disclosure of conditions at Willowbrook, a Staten Island institution for children with mental retardation. Not only were children abused and living in squalor with little medical or mental health care, some of them were reportedly used as test cases for hepatitis studies. The nation as a whole was appalled when a young investigator, Geraldo Rivera, went into the institution with a hidden camera and revealed the unthinkable conditions at Willowbrook.
The Willowbrook expose was followed by a book written by Burton Blatt and Fred Kaplan, entitled Christmas in Purgatory: A Photographic Essay On Mental Retardation. As part of a research project at a Connecticut facility for persons with mental retardation, this book presented explicit photographs of residents being treated “less humanely, with less care, and under more deplorable conditions than animals.” In the Introduction, Dr. Blatt stated, “There is a hell on earth, and in America there is a special inferno. We were visitors there during Christmas, 1965.”
As a student, I felt sure that these dramatic exposés would demand that residential institutions be carefully monitored and the persons living in them treated with dignity and kindness. The sad truth did not bear out my optimism.
When I became a professor in special education in the early 1970s, I took a group of students to visit a residential institution not far from our university. Although this was considered a model facility by many, my students and I witnessed an appalling procedure. As we were touring the grounds, we observed a fenced-in area where a large group of naked young men were being hosed off by attendants. We were appalled at the lack of dignity afforded these residents.
Almost half a century later we are still confronted with atrocities perpetrated on those persons most vulnerable in our society. Sure, in response to the article concerning abuse at the Corpus Christi institution, Texas state officials have announced steps to prevent more abuse. They intend to add supervisors to evening shifts, install security cameras in public areas at all 13 state institutions for people with intellectual disabilities, and to “continue to take swift and immediate action when abuse and neglect is reported.” But we know this does not address the real problem.
Originally placed in out-of-the way places, residential institutions were designed to protect the residents as well as the community. Such isolation seems to breed neglect and abuse that go unnoticed by citizens at large. The claim that this practice is less expensive for the state is not a valid reason for the continuation of such large, unmanageable facilities.
I have felt encouraged by the national trend leading to group homes, supervised apartments, family-supervised living, and other arrangements for people with developmental disabilities to live in communities and enjoy the rights of all citizens. In districts where this occurs, the population as a whole grows in many ways. The inclusion of persons with disabilities adds to the sense of diversity that makes us interested in each other and helps us develop sensitivity to the worth of all individuals.
The Texas incident reminds me that we must all be advocates for those less able to advocate for themselves. As advocates, we should be aware of past injustices, learn from our experiences, and be proactive in seeing that the past will not be repeated.