Sign the Petition Against Gay Death Penalty in Uganda

Tomorrow, the Ugandan Parliament will vote on a gay death penalty bill. This is horrible. Gay people are already in danger of the death penalty, but this bill could make it even worse. AVAAZ has created a
petition to sign against this bill. The site is not very accessible, so don’t blame me for not having signed it myself. I am just passing this on for everyone who is opposed to homophobia like I am.

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Repressed Memories in the Dutch Court System

There are two countries where the emergence of repressed memories of sexual abuse is common: the United States and the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, the controversy around whether one can repress memories at all and whether they are to be trusted, led to strict regulations for people seeking court action in cases of repressed memories.

Firstly, unlike in some states of the U.S., the expiration period for crime does not start at the moment of remembering, but at one’s eighteenth birthday. This way, the risk is lessened that people will have their family members charged over some dispute later in life.

Secondly and more importantly, alleged victims of represssed sexual abuse – and any form of ritual abuse – will have to be evaluated by a team of experts. This team includes a forensic researcher, a clinical psychologist, and a psychologist with expertise in memory. It is said that these experts are not there to allege that repressed memories or ritual abuse are not real per se, but to make sure the testimony is looked at carefully. In practgice, however, many cases are dismmissed over this sort of evaluation.

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Victory for Alex Oudman

Last week, the psychiatrist responsible for Alex Oudman’s long-term seclusion, was reprimanded by one of the Dutch regional medical disciplinary boards. Reprimanding is the second lightest sentence, after a warning, but it has a huge impact on doctors. Alex Oudman is a severely autistic man who lived in a mental institution in the northern Netherlands when he was secluded for months at a time in 2008. His family made sure the media was alerted, which even led to questions from MPs and new government policy to reduce the amount of seclusion in Dutch institutions. The family also went to the disciplinary board. I do not know yet whether the psychiatrist will appeal the reprimanding.

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Canadian Government Fights Court Battle Not to Make Websites Accessible

I am not a Canadian, but this astonishes me. The Canadian governmnet is fighting a court case in order to not have to make its websites accessible for screen reader users. Anna over at FWD?Forward has extensive coverage. I am as surprised as she is that the government is willing to pour taxpayer money into this case rather than putting that same money into making their websites accessible. Speak of cost-effectiveness, for once. Three million Canadians are blind or partially sighted, so this court battle is not just about the person who started it. Three million Canadians will benefit if the government stops its efforts to fight a court battle and pours the money saved into accessibility projects.

Anna is calling onto Canadians to E-mail their MPs. I am not a Canadian, so I cannot do that. However, I can echo her request to all contact your MPs and let them know what you think. Anna has a sample E-mail you can use.

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Formal Complaint Filed in Alex Oudman Isolation Case

Alex Oudman is a 50-year-old man with autism. Two years ago, he spent months in an isolation room at two Dutch mental health institutions. Before then, he’d lived for twelve years at a workhome – a sheltered living and working placement for severely autistic people – in Zuidlaren near Groningen. According to the psychiatrist responsible for Mr. Oudman’s seclusion, Alex started showing aggression while at the workhome and was therefore moved to a ward with seclusion facilities. That ward couldn’t handle him, so they sent him to a clinic in Amsterdam where it is said there is lots of expertise in autism. INstead of being observed or treated, Alex was agan secluded for months, until at last his family sent pictures of him to a Dutch TV program.

Now, two years later, the family has filed a formal complaint with the regional medical board in Groningen. They claim the long-term seclusion caused Alex to deteriorate, and that an alternative – placement in an institution for developmentally disabled persons – was available. The psychiatrist contends that Mr. Oudman consented to the isolation. As a psychiatric patient who has had “consensual” seclusion plans, I can tell you that consent doesn’t always mean real consent. Besides, it is said that Alex has the mental capacity of a 6-year-old child, so that makes me wonder even more whether he understands the manipulative language often used to get patients to consent to seclusion.

The medical board will give their opinion in two months. Unfortunately, doctors rarely are disciplined even for worse actions, so I am skeptical that Mr. Oudman and his family will be taken seriously.

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Autistic Student Denied Education, Loses Court Battle

Recently, an autistic man in the UK lost a court case over his lack of education when he was rtwelve. During that time, his former school could not deal with his behavior problems. They expelled him, and left him without education for eighteen months before another school was found that would take him. Now, A., as he is referred to in court, claimed damages, but the case cannot go to full trial. The organization representing the man is considering going to the European Court of Human Rights.

This is sad. What is sadder, is that quite a number of students with disabilities are left without education for reasons similar to A.’s. School distritcts excuse lack of education by the argument that they don’t have the resources to educate “difficult” students. Even in countries like the Netherlands, where school attendance is compulsory – I don’t know about the UK -, students are left behind to sit at home.

An educational system should be focused on educating students. When the resources are not available, these should be sought. Children have the rirhg tot education. I see no reason why this should not go for the most “difficult” students.

Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure schools will always be able to find loopholes in the system. In the Netherlands, we have a number of “dustbin” schools which take the unwanted but fail to educate them. If the “dustbin” schools don’t want you, you can just be refused entry to the classroom. It is rather enraging how sometimes the most vulnerable students are denied an education they most definitely need. Makes me wonder, for once, how economically feasible this is.

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Forced Institutionalization: Loopholes in the Dutch System

Yesterday, s.e. smith wrote a very interesting post at FWD/Forward about forced institutionalization. Specifically, ou discusses a recent legal victory for a woman whom Medicaid tried to force into an institution in 2008. From there on, however, s.e. continues to discuss the more subtle ways of force present in a society that devalues disabled people’s independence and autonomy.

The whole story got me thinking about my own situation and the situation in the Netherlands in general. Firstly, legally speaking, we are not as advanced as the United States where it comes to disabled people’s right to live in the community. There is no equivalent to the Olmstead case here, or for that matter any legislation which rules forced institutionalization discriminatory. Here, we rely on a few bits of long-term care legislation which are theoretically supposed to enable people with disabilities to access care in their own communities, but which in practice are full of loopholes.

First in the line of presumed-to-enable-community-services regulations in the Netherlands is the Community Assistance Act of 2007. This bill moved some home care services away from the national long-term care insurance into the local social care system. The idea was that local communities know their residents best and are best able to provide for their needs. The reality is that some cities grant people more services than other cities, and most people lost services as compared to before the Community Assistance Act. Besides, quality of care went down with along-the-way privatization.

Second and most promising came, in 2008, the “complete pacakage at home”, which is, in theory, an innovative way to get people with disabilities care equivalent to an institutional setting but in their own communities. People can, if they have funding for residential care, request their care provider to provide their services in their own home. However, the biggest loophole here is that the care agency decides whether they want to provide this type of residential care at home. Alternatively, people can, also as of 2008, access a personal care budget for residential care – personal care budgets used to be open to home care only -, so that they can hire their own care professionals. The problem here is with the management of the care money, which the person with disabilities should be capable of themself. Besides, health minister Klink just closed personal care budgets to new applicants until the end of 2010, so those who would, with a personal budget, be able to live in their own communities, are possibly forced into institutions again.

However, even if the law were perfect, which it isn’t of course, that wouldn’t mean all people with disabilities could get the support they needed in the setting they desired. As s.e. writes, legislation doesn’t change bad attitudes. Lack of access to information can be one barrier to individualized care even if the law is behind you. Lack of resources or skills to fihgt a legal fight can be another. I, for one, have the theoretical knowledge to know that I could, maybe, live in the community with the services I need, but I do not have the ability to fight for this.

Besides, the risks of such a non-conventional care arrangement are quite high. Should your support funding be denied – which is easily done with both home and residential supports -, should an agency refuse to provide in-home residential care, or should you not be able to find a care provider, you’re stuck in your own home possibly without care. I, for one, have had more than enough experience with falling apart while in my own home and the consequences it had, that I’m simply too fearful to undertake such a risky care path, even if it could enable me to live in an environment I choose.

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Thoughts on Requirements for Legal Sex Change

As Helen G pointed out on Questioning Transphobia, in the United States, sexual reassignment surgery is no longer required for a sex change on one’s passport. The reasoning behind this change of policy is that some trans travelers have been at risk in countries where changing sex is dangerous. People can also get a temporary passport when they are in the process of transitioning.

This has me thinking about the Dutch situation, where there is no difference between sex on travel documents and on any other legal document. In the Netherlands, one’s legal sex can be changed only if one has completed sexual reassignment surgery, unless it would be medically or psychologically necessary not to perform this surgery. Since non-op transgenderism is hardly recognized in the Netherlands, it’s going to be very hard to get to this status, and pre-op trans people are of course left with their assigned sex on legal documents.

When I learned about the lgal requirements for a sex change on one’s official documents in the Netherlands through my health law handbook, another thing I noticed, was that, in the Netherlands, it is required that one be sterilized before applying for a legal sex change. There is no medical or psychological exception to this requirement. The reasoning, according to the handbook, is that it would be harmful to a future child to be born to a post-transition trans person. I fail to understand this logic, and no arguments were given. It’s probably that society has decided that only those we call “female” can birth children, and, for this reason, a child is very likely to be harmed psychologically by the idea of being born out of a male body. However, isn’t the correct reasoning here that they are harmed by the incogruence between their parent’s body and society’s current norms? In that case, one may question which of these is wrong, in fact. I tend to consider society’s norm of body policing as wrong, but, apparently, the majority thinks differently.

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House Approves Bill Limiting Restraint and Seclusion in Schools

Good news: according to an article in the Washington Post, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act. I wrote about the bill last December. I’m hoping for this bill to pass the Senate, too, because non-emergency and dangerous restraint and seclusion really needs to stop.

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New York Ordered to Move Mentally Ill Out of Group Homes

A judge ordered New York to move people with mental illness out of group homes and into the community. This is a good thing. The state is ordered to open 1,500 supported housing units each year for the next three years, so that most of the people now living in the New York City institutional adult homes can move into their own apartments or small homes. Only those with the most severe mental illness, including those who are a danger to themselves or others, and those who themselves choose so, should remain in the group homes.

This is precisely where my main worry comes in: who are those “most severely mentally ill”? Clay Adams of Comet’s Corner is also concerned. With the cost of rent, a nurse and a healthcare assistant to provide the necessary care, $40,000 is easily reached by those with more serious mental health problems. I, for one, at least used to cost more than that. What will happen to these people, who are truly not “cost effective” by the judge’s standards? My guess is that they will just be left with less than optimal services until or unless they become a threat to themselves and others, at which point they will be steered back into the adult home. No matter how small this number may be according to the mental illness advocates, civil rights are still conditionally provided to those for whom it would be feasible again.

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