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Behind the Scenes of "When Help Hurts"
After the #MeToo movement, conversations about consent have got amplified. But do we pause to consider consent when it comes to a non-disabled person giving assistance to a disabled person? This personal narrative piece by Ria Andriani – the second story our Unbias the News team brings to you – talks exactly about this.
Editing this story was a deeply collaborative process, involving long conversations with the author. In these talks, it became clear that when someone tries to assist a person with a disability, the ‘helper’ comes with a lot of assumptions. They assume the disabled person needs help each time, whether the aid has been asked for or not. These assistants often don’t seek consent before providing help or touching the disabled person.
To reflect the author’s experience and show what unsolicited help can look like, we commissioned Viola Gesmundo to create the illustration for this piece. The author was also a part of this process where we described the illustration to her to make sure it represented her and her experience accurately. We hope it depicts how being touched without consent can be a violation, a taking away of someone’s agency. This is especially true for disabled women.
That’s because women with disabilities are twice as likely to be sexually assaulted, as the numbers have already shown in Australia (where the author resides), Canada and Wales. In 2015, working in Zambia, Uganda, India and Turkey, Human Rights Watch found that disabled women were three times more susceptible to rape.
Despite these facts, disabled people are still burdened with the expectation to justify themselves when they say no to help at times. Society expects them to be apologetic when refusing someone. They are only supposed to be grateful for the 'favor'.
We hope this story will help more people get rid of such presumptions, and respect disabled people’s right to give or withhold consent when it comes to receiving assistance. Ria’s story also mentions people who offer their help in the best possible manner, and how they do it without imposing themselves. We are hoping it will make people sensitive to the needs and personal space of persons with disabilities.
In order to make our piece more accessible, in consultation with our author, we have kept our illustration black and white. We have also embedded within the story its audio version, so people can listen to it. If you have tips about how we can make our stories more reader friendly when it comes to persons with disabilities, we hope you will write to us.
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It was already dark when Samrin was left alone in the woods. He had no backpack, sleeping bag, or food. His phone was running out of battery. The next morning, Samrin came online briefly to send Sanooja a final message on WhatsApp: “No water, I think I’ll die. Trangam, I love you.”
From 2013 to the present, Refaat has searched everywhere for their children. For ten years he has been traveling, asking, and searching. He has even appeared on TV hoping one day to be reunited with them. But to this day he still does not know if his children were saved or if they are two of the 268 victims of the October 11, 2013 shipwreck, one of the worst Mediterranean disasters in the last three decades.
“My wish is that even 100 years from now these graves stand as monuments of the EU’s shame. Because it was not the river that killed these people, but the EU border regime.”
No one ever comes to visit, but on days when there are funerals here and flowers are about to be thrown out, I place them on the tombs containing the unknown migrants,” he explains. “In some of the older graves, you have the remains of up to five or six migrants together, each placed in separate sacks within the same niche to save space.”
Latsoudi recalls something a refugee had mentioned to her in 2015: ‘The worst thing that can happen to us is to die somewhere far away and have no one at our funeral’.
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