Psychiatric and sexual abuse

 Some assorted thoughts of the day (CW: psychiatric abuse and sexual abuse) --

1. Psychiatric abuse (which for this purpose, I'm defining as any NONCONSENSUAL interference in a person's neurological or cognitive processes) is a profoundly intimate violation that is, at some level, a sexual or sexualized violation.

2. Mainstream society is more likely to recognize the sexualized implications of this when the victim is female rather than male (thus why drugging a nonconsenting woman's drink, for instance, is recognized as an implicitly sexual threat, while drugging a nonconsenting man's drink is not, even though of course it COULD be -- men are victims of date rape drugs too, after all).

3. However, psychiatric abuse is only commonly recognized as wrong and violating at all (including potentially sexually so) when the victims are neurotypical to begin with. This includes sexualized psychiatric abuse.

4. Forms of psychiatric abuse that would be recognized as not only abusive, but abusive in a specifically sexualized way (e.g. an adult training a child to accept physically painful expressions of physical affection by rewarding her when she passively accepts unwanted affection and punishing her when she refuses it) are therefore not recognized as either abusive or sexualized when the victims are disabled/neurodivergent people.

5. Medical and caregiving contexts are presumed to erase sexual intent, and thus erase the possibility of sexual abuse or sexualized physical or psychiatric abuse. This is included in children's education about sexual abuse, e.g. "No one should touch your bathing suit area* except a doctor."

6. Because disabled people are perpetually considered "patients" (as evidenced by nonsensical terms like "Down Syndrome patients"), all interactions between disabled people and typical people (especially those in helping or caregiver roles) are given the presumption of nonsexual intent (and thus, potential for sexual or sexualized physical/psychiatric abuse is presumed erased). Some advocates have attributed this to the fact that disabled people are desexualized, and this is certainly a big part of it, but it's also that the caregiver role is desexualized.

7. I realize this is a dangerous point to be making, because ALREADY too much discussion of potentially-sexualized medical abuse is derailed by arguments about whether it's sexual rather than about whether it's abuse. Any medical, physical, or psychiatric abuse is abuse, regardless of sexual intent or lack thereof. But also, separately -- sometimes it's sexual.

8. A sexualized violation can occur without the perpetrator necessarily having sexual intent. Forcibly drugging an abled, neurotypical woman without her consent is recognized as a sexualized violation, even if the perpetrator does not do so with sexual intent. There's no reason not rooted in oppression that equivalent violations of disabled people (and, to a lesser extent, of abled neurotypical men) are not seen as similarly sexualized violations.

*Side note: When did "bathing suit area" get to be the preferred euphemism here? It's weird.