"Ive been bad 4 years & years": a story of disability, abuse and silence

These ominous words were found scrawled on a wooden post in a secret basement room of the Haut de la Garenne, until recently a children's home on the island of Jersey off the coast of England. Investigators opened the room when a child's skull was found under concrete on the property, following up a tip from an investigation elsewhere on the island. What makes it less than remarkable is that the children who have apparently been victimised were disabled.

This story has all the ingredients the British tabloid press loves: child abuse, conspiracy, a "live" version of the currently popular misery memoir genre. Sadly, I am unsurprised. Every large-scale report ever done on institutional care for people with disabilities has turned up evidence of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
It's about placing people in a powerful position over others seen as less than human, in isolated situations. In the Haut de la Garenne case, the problem is magnified by the insularity of island society, where everyone knows everyone, and all political and social power is held by a few wealthy families.
Former care workers, family members and an ousted local politician have been trying to get someone, anyone to investigate what happened at the care home for decades. People have approached the Jersey government, the British government (Jersey is sort of an independent protectorate of the UK, and was occupied by the Germans in WWII), and even parish priests in hopes that someone would help. The response has been: silence.
And even now, as a media hysteria takes over, there is silence over some of the most important details of the story.
It appears that there has been some child abuse at this site since at least the 1950s. Shackles, traces of blood, and further evidence have been uncovered. This morning, police began to break through into a second, bricked-up secret room. They say there may be several of these, based on testimony from the over 160 alleged victims who have now come forward. But for the last 20 years of its operation, the home was used specifically for disabled children, many of whom will not be able to come forward due to lack of speech, or inability to understand the news or even what happened to them.
In "man on the street" interviews, people have wondered aloud... how could a child have died at the home, and no one raised the alarm? How could perhaps over 100 children have been abused there and no one knew? (Actually, it may be worse than that. The current investigation began when former members of the local Sea Scouts chapter told investigators two years ago that as children they had been taken to the care home and abused.)
The answer is that as a society we have devalued the lives of people with disabilities. In the 1950s, 1960s and even much later, many families of disabled children were encouraged by the state to put them in institutions and forget them. Institutions were built in isolated areas to keep people with disabilities out of the public eye. The focus of institutional care was to save public or charity money--in some institutions, residents were even issued shapeless "sack dresses," male or female, to avoid the hassle of washing individual clothing or removing clothing when using the toilet. Incidentally, institutional care also played an important part in driving the larger economy: it allowed many women to enter the workplace by offloading the care of healthy children (in the case of poor families--the Haut de la Garenne was originally founded to take poor children), disabled children and adults, and elderly people.
People were lost in this system. As someone who works in autism, I can tell you that "lost" people are still being found. There are adults with autism in the UK and Scotland who mistakenly ended up in mental hospitals and have languished there for decades, misdiagnosed and drugged up to the eyeballs. I have met many middle-aged adults with mental retardation who were in institutional care from infancy until the 1990s and beyond. Particularly vivid in my memory is an older man, one of the last to be released from Oregon's Dammasch State Hospital in the 1990s, who had been born and raised in the hospital. When released he was non-verbal and aggressive. The last time I saw him he had learned a few words and was grinning from ear to ear as he sat with his carer.

The Haut de la Garenne case represents the "worst case scenario" but only by matters of degree. For those of us who have children or family members with disabilities, it cuts close to home. We have experienced the devaluation of our loved ones, from schools that label them as "unteachable" to employers who are unwilling to take a chance on someone different, from ugly looks in the supermarket to doctors who believe it would be better if disability could be eliminated through genetic testing and abortion. We fear that without our daily vigilance and good luck, our loved ones could end up at the mercy of some sadist in a group home, sheltered workshop, mental hospital, or prison. We know that as long as our loved ones lack health care coverage and the financial and personal support required to live decently, they will always be at the most frightening level of risk.

And we also know that whenever people are given power over devalued people, the results are entirely predictable, in Abu Ghraib or the Haut de la Garenne.