Incomplete: Women with intellectual disabilities, sexual abuse and neighbours

The man, 26, had been holding two women with intellectual disabilities captive. He sexually, emotionally and psychologically abused them and beat them on repeated occasions with sticks and chains, for a period of at least three years. According to the indictment, the two victims tolerated, accepted as natural and justified all of these situations because they have “dependent personality traits, due to mental retardation.” The indictment included testimony that corroborated the physical and psychological violence. One statement was from a neighbour who acknowledged that he saw the man hitting the women “every day”. La Diaria, January 2016

 

Neighbours

If this account were the beginning of a detective novel, I would like to think that the key, the potential mystery or narrative crux of the plot, revolved around the character of the neighbour. Did he (like these “retarded” women) also accept and justify this violence as natural? Or did his silence imply something even more deeply silenced, unknown even to him, the thread of a secret complicity that led to the other possible meanings of this story?

But this is not a work of fiction. It is from a news story published recently in a Uruguayan newspaper, under the headline “Se destapó la olla” (literally, the lid was taken off the pot, an expression in Spanish similar to “opening up a can of worms”). According to the writer, it was the women’s “dependent personality traits” that led them to accept the abusive conditions of their relationship with the man charged. Perhaps – except an individual’s “personality” is not something we are simply assigned with, a priori, but rather a map sketched by all of our life experiences. Or a mirror, reflecting the images we construct of ourselves, based on the ways we are seen by those around us.

In the case of girls and women with intellectual disabilities, this state of dependence and vulnerability to manipulation is not at all “natural”. On the contrary, it is a highly recognisable form of subordination, constructed and cultivated (socially, individually) through the rejection, lack of opportunities, educational exclusion, and often degrading, manipulative and devastating treatment that so many of them face throughout their lives from the people who surround them. A mirror that almost never reflects a smile.

Violence

Violence and sexual abuse are things that nobody can tolerate seeing, and therefore must be ignored. In this case, the “absent presence” of the neighbour speaks not only of someone who prefers to deny the violence taking place before his eyes. His attitude, which is not at all uncommon, also reflects the failure to recognise that these women are persons, due to the fact that their personhood is cloaked and hidden by the illusion of their personalities. This also implies a type of violence, in the way that these women’s status as persons is rejected and denied.

Sigmund Freud spoke of something I associate with this in an essay he wrote almost 100 years ago, entitled Das Unheimliche (translated into English as “The Uncanny”). The concept refers to something that is familiar yet at the same time disconcerting. Different languages translate the German expression used by Freud in terms that reinforce the different meanings at play. In Greek, for example, unheimlich is translated as xenos, which is translated into English as “stranger” or “foreigner”. In English, other translations besides “uncanny” include “eerie” and “sinister”, the word used for the Spanish translation of Freud’s essay (El Siniestro). Freud illustrates the term with the example of “when an inanimate object – a picture or a doll – comes to life.”

In many ways, the rejection provoked by disability is similar to sensations like these, of discomfort or even repulsion. Perhaps this is why nobody seems to know how to properly refer to these people, much less how to interact with them, and even less so, how to assist them and intervene when they are being abused. Living beings are treated like inanimate objects.

Recently I was told about a woman with an intellectual disability who leads a seemingly happy life in the small town where she lives. She has attained a rather high degree of independence and has even managed to find love and form part of a couple. The person who told me this story knew this woman as “la incompleta” (the incomplete woman), a friendly if rather blunt nickname used for people with intellectual disabilities in many small towns in the Uruguayan interior. How should we refer to the incompleteness of these people? How close should we get to them, how should we treat them, how can we listen to them? Faced with such uncertainty, many prefer to look the other way, to sweep the differences under the carpet of silence, even if they are in plain sight of everyone.

Stories like the one told in this newspaper article shouldn’t just inspire pity or horror. They also offer lessons that can help take the lid off the silence. One of those lessons, perhaps the main one, is about the need to take a stand, and look past the preconceptions and illusions.

As I heard someone say recently, “If we don’t want to be like our neighbours, we have to stop acting like them.”

Translated by Lori Nordstrom lorinord@yahoo.ca

Also in Spanish at http://www.sergiomeresman.com/abuso-sexual-discapacidad/