Emily Dash is an emerging writer, actor, producer and speaker who works across theatre and screen. Her acclaimed and wide ranging work emphasises social justice issues, community engagement, intersectionality, and expanding perceptions of disability. Watch her spoken word performance about owning your power and taking up space as a person with disability which was presented at the ‘Where To From Here Conference 2022’.
As a disability rights lawyer who represents people with disabilities and their families every day, I know that there is often a lot of confusion and fear around guardianship laws; especially about why they exist. This article is designed to fill you in on how these laws came to be and what role they have in a modern Australia that acknowledges the human rights of people with disability.
This fifteenth session of the Conference of States Parties to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities is an important moment for stocktaking and reflection. With 185 ratifications since its adoption in 2006, the Convention has crystallized the commitment of the international community to realize an inclusive, accessible, and sustainable world for all.
Non-disabled people, who lack direct experience of life with disabilities, often assume that disabled people are, and should be, fearful — in the sense of being timid, risk averse, or weak — as a natural consequence of their disabilities. But when disabled people actually express fears tied to ableism, abusive practices, or bad public policies, they are often dismissed as over-anxious, irrational, or even delusional.
Disability activism can be exciting, empowering, and enormously fulfilling — especially for people with disabilities themselves. It can also be exhausting and frustrating. And to outside observers, newcomers, and longtime activists, disability activism can seem futile, maybe even fatally flawed.
Over the next hour, I heard a dozen personal stories, each as enraging and saddening as the next, but all following a similar theme. During their late teens or early 20s, each of these people were told, usually by a close family member or friend, that they “weren’t smart enough to vote” or it “wasn’t worth the effort to learn”.
Proud Indigenous man Thomas Marks tells his story of being Stolen Gen, incarceration and turning his life around through art. This is his story told in his own words for the Disability Royal Commission.
This case is about when and how an appointed guardian can authorise the use of forcible physical restraint in order to administer medication to people under their guardianship. This case concerned an older woman, HYY, who was under a guardianship order. HYY was voluntarily admitted to hospital for treatment of her psychological and physical health conditions. However, at times during her hospital stay HYY refused to take her anticoagulant medication.
Did you know that disabled people cant legally talk to the media about their guardianship or administration hearings and experiences? They have to go to VCAT to ask permission. If they are unhappy with what happened to them at VCAT, they have to go and ask VCAT for permission to talk to the media about that.
Ann Marie Smith died in abject circumstances, at the hands of her carer in the middle-class Adelaide suburb of Kingston Park. Her killing raises questions about the way our society treats the Disabled, in life and in death. .
This program reveals the reality of the lives of many Australians with disabilities, who say they’ve been virtually abducted by the state, stripped of their assets, and stopped from speaking out – until now.
She inspired a heroic revolution. In the 90s, Barbara Lisicki and her then partner Alan Holdsworth together organised brave, co-ordinated protests that pushed the campaign for disabled rights into the spotlight. They chained themselves to buses and they blocked streets. Wheelchair users were lifted from their chairs by police and laid down in the roads to try to deter them. And now, a new BBC drama will tell the story. Barbara is in the studio to talk about the behind the scenes events that inspired the show.
“As well as experiencing violence from family and our partners in our private home, we’re in disability group homes or in mental health inpatient wards. We’ve got disability support workers coming into our homes to do things like help us go to bed and help us shower,” Jen Hargrave from Women with Disability Victoria said.
“Violence against women and girls with disabilities is not perpetrated by a ‘few bad apples,’ it looks like street harassment, controlling behaviours by paid and unpaid carers, doctors and policy-makers taking away reproductive choices, and institutional violence.”
A new groundbreaking report has revealed alarmingly high rates of violence experienced by women and girls with disabilities, with 65 per cent having experienced violence. Our Watch and Women with Disabilities Victoria has found women and girls with disabilities are twice as likely to experience physical and sexual violence compared to able bodied women and girls.
Guest: Jen Hargrave, Senior Policy Officer at Women with Disabilities Victoria