Intro: 


(JANAE INTRO)


March is National Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month. For disability rights and service organizations, March is a time to raise awareness about the inclusion of people with developmental disabilities in all aspects of community life, and the barriers that people with disabilities face. 


For those of us working in the movement to end sexual and intimate partner violence, National Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month gives us an opportunity to look inward at ourselves and our movement… to learn more about the challenges people with developmental disabilities face in preventing and ending sexual violence… and to examine whether our movement and organizations are truly the safe and accessible spaces we want them to be. 


People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities experience sexual and domestic violence at drastically higher rates but have historically not been included in shaping solutions. 
Despite immense barriers, self-advocates in the disability community are making huge steps to advocate for disability justice in prevention and advocacy spaces. 
For this special 2-part episode of PreventConnect… we pulled together some of the most impactful keynotes and interviews to come out of PreventConnect and VALOR around disability justice and inclusion… along with some new interviews about how staff are putting what we’ve learned into practice. 


Each of the pieces you’ll listen to in this episode were created years apart… spanning from 2020 to earlier this month. But the through-lines they share help to pave a way forward, to break down our movemen’t systemic ties to ableism and oppression and make intentional space for people with disabilities to lead. 


Our first highlight takes us to 2021… when the COVID-19 pandemic forced our movement to find creative ways to connect with each other in the midst of a global shutdown. 


Lydia X.Z. Brown took the virtual stage of the National Sexual Assault Conference to lead SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND DISABILITY: WHY EVERY MOVEMENT NEEDS DISABILITY JUSTICE… a session dedicated to understanding the deep roots of ableism and white supremacy… and how they permeate through the very fabric of how we offer healing. 


At its core, ableism is a form of structural, systemic, and institutional oppression. That is, ableism is a system of power differentials and power relations, wherein those people whose body minds are deemed as or perceived to be 


healthy, whole, functional, sane, stable, strong, intelligent, and beautiful are granted enormous political, cultural, social, and economic power at the direct expense of those of us whose body minds are instead rendered as broken, sick, defective, disordered, deviant, delinquent, dependent, weak. 


unstable, crazy, dumb, or ugly. In other words, ableism teaches us what kinds of body minds are valuable, worthy, and desirable, and what kinds of body minds are expendable and disposable. Ableism teaches us what kinds of people ought to be able to live, to breathe, to be, to literally take up space, and what kinds of people ought not to exist. 


ought to be prevented from coming into existence in the first place and ought to be eliminated from existence as it is now. Ableism teaches us what kinds of people ought to reproduce and to be reproduced and what kinds of people ought to be allowed to have children and what kinds of children even ought to be allowed to be born. Ableism teaches us what kinds of people who are considered to have lives that are worth protecting. 


and saving and living and which people's lives can be thrown away and destroyed. Ableism as a form of oppression is an inextricably intertwined with, interconnected with, necessary for, and dependent upon every other form of oppression that exists. In particular, ableism is virulently and violently anti -black, anti -native. 


and anti -Asian. Throughout the history of this country, ableist rhetorics have underlined the ways that racism, white supremacy, settler colonialism, and imperialism have always operated. And they continue to inform the way that we understand race, gender, class, and other modes and axes of identity, domination, and oppression today. Under white supremacist ideology, 


Both abledness and disableness are always defined against whiteness. That means that to be white is to be defined as abled. A white person who is fully white is defined as being well, healthy, smart, strong, and beautiful. This is why there was a presumption that Black 


brown, Latinx, indigenous, and Asian people do not have the same physical or cognitive capacities as white people. And to the extent that any of us are perceived as or said to be physically or intellectually superior to white people, that supposed superiority only exists to be fed. 


to the superiority and supremacy of whiteness. That has always been the case. Both ableness and disableness are defined as against whiteness. What does that mean? That to be white is to be defined as being able, in the same way that to be white is to be defined as being Christian, as being masculine, heterosexual, cisgender, class privileged, and educated. Now we all know that not all white people 


have those experiences of other forms of privilege. And that is part of the way that oppression operates within white supremacy. That is why white trans people are treated as lesser versions of white people than white cis people. That is why white women are treated as lesser versions of women than white men. And this is why, when white disabled people exist in the world, they experience ableism, undoubtedly. 


because ableism and white supremacy operate together to tell white disabled people that their disabilities detract from their whiteness and their potential to participate in and benefit from the institution of whiteness. And so for any white person who experiences some other forms of marginality besides race because they're racially privileged, that their experience of marginality must be hidden, masked, overcome, or if. 


in order for that person to fully benefit from or experience whiteness. And likewise, on the flip side of that is that when disability shows up in negatively racialized communities, that is in Black, Brown, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and mixed race communities, our disabilities are said to detract further from our personhood and to serve as prima facie evidence. 


of our supposed innate inferiority compared to whiteness. The other way to understand that is in recognizing how ableism operates by racial designation. When white people are disabled, white supremacy and ableism respond to white disabled people with pity and charity. 


white disabled people become deserving of accommodation, support, and services, if only from a highly pity -based, medicalized, condescending, charity -oriented saviorism. 


And meanwhile, disabled people of color exist as dangerous, threatening, contaminant, and contagion. The disability in our communities becomes something to control, something to manage, something to disappear.


JANAE TRANSITION:


Lydia calls on us to shift the lens in which we look at ableism… and all forms of oppression… to see it not as a silho’d act of violence against one group of people… but the vehicle in which white supremacy becomes woven into the fabric of our attitudes… beliefs and values. We prioritize which people should be deserving of dignity and respect and dehumanize those who do not fit the mold...in this case… a white, able-bodied, cisgender… straight mold.


PreventConnect Intro 


According to the National Crime Victimization Survey… people with disabilities are more than three times more likely than nondisabled people to experience serious violent crime. Even so… many anti-gender-based programs are not accessible and create increased barriers for people with disabilities to access care and healing. 


Cierra Olivia Thomas Williams spoke about how ableism feeds into violence in the form of isolation… during a 2022 PreventConnect Podcast: Disability Justice, Moving at the Speed of Trust. During our conversation about Disability Justice and Prevention…




It's really important to say that ableism never works alone. It's an integral piece of racism. Ableism never works alone. It's an integral piece of racism and sexism and transphobia and other forms of prejudice. They need each other. And ableism contributes to so many risks for sexual violence, victimization and perpetration. And it works in apparent ways like, 


through poverty and lack of employment opportunities. And it works in non -apparent ways, like through unwritten organizational norms and practices. And so I want to get a little bit more specific about what ableism can look like in sexual violence. And I'm going to use the example of isolation. Isolation increases the likelihood for perpetration of sexual violence against people with disabilities. And, 


At ICADV, we believe that checking in with people and calling people into conversation when harmful behavior occurs is one avenue to make abusive behavior a difficult or unsupported choice to make. And that support network is so critical because it's a way of self -governance where we call each other into conversation and heal when we mess up. But isolation provides the opportunity for violence. 


through impeding these forms of social support and inclusion. And neurodivergent people and people with disabilities experience isolation in institutions and within their own families and neighborhoods. So one example of this is that neighborhoods lack accessible housing and sidewalks. I counted all of the houses in my neighborhood and there were 103 and only three of them were accessible with ramps. 


And what does that do to a person who needs housing? I mean, there are very few options there. So in terms of prevention strategies at the individual level, some of this isolation can look like people with disabilities are often not offered sex education as youth or adults and classrooms are literally segregated. 


And interpersonally, people with disabilities are not supported by caregivers and family to experience different forms of relationships, including sexual ones. And in the disability field, they call this dignity of risk. People who are considered non -disabled are just by default given and have the opportunity to experience all kinds of relationships and 


Experience guides future behavior. So access to protective information and experience with all kinds of relationships really is critical to one's safety in the future. So structurally, to support those interpersonal things, there are no laws that support the delivery of critical protective information about human bodies and human relationships. 


Just as Cierra spoke about how sexual health education completely leaves out people with intellectual and developmental disabilities… we in the anti-violence movement are no strangers to othering. Historically, many in our movement have othered black and brown women and queer people… just as culture has taught us to. That othering shows up in the people we serve and the ways we provide service. It both compounds the violence marginalized communities face… and creates bigger barriers to them receiving care. 


But as Lydia… and our other guests in this podcast offer… Disability Justice gives us a new way through. Disability Justice moves us beyond inclusion at the table… it reshapes the table entirely. Disability Justice centers intersectionality and the ways diverse systems of oppression amplify and reinforce one another. It’s not a program… or a project. Disability justice is a value and a framework of seeing people as whole, and creating intentional space for people harmed by op pressive violence to deign solutions. 








We are not wrong or burdensome or broken for having needs or for choosing to meet them. That it does not make us a problem, that we are not the problem to be solved, to be managed. Disability justice teaches us that all of our body minds are valuable and worthy and desirable. Disability justice teaches us that all of us have needs and that our needs deserve to be met. That chief among our needs for each of us, 


are the needs for care, the needs for access, the need for freedom, the need for justice. But disability justice reminds us that there is no person whose humanity is conditional, that there is no person whose humanity must be earned, whose personhood is merely optional or potential, but never fully realized, achieved, or recognized. 


Disability justice helps us to understand and to carve out a vision for what it is we are fighting for. Why it is we are telling our stories, what it means that we are transforming toward or into when we talk about transformative justice. What are we working and fighting for? What are we moving toward? Disability justice is a set of principles, practice, guiding vision, futurity. It is world making. 


It is sustenance. Disability justice itself as a framework was created just within the last 15 years by a collective of queer and trans disabled people and Black, Indigenous, and other people of color within the disabled community, and particularly queer and trans disabled people of color. And disability justice framework was created as a direct response to an expansion upon the limiting frameworks of rights. 


of equity, of inclusion, or of equality, to recognize and to understand that when we talk about disability oppression, when we talk about ableism, the system of power differentials and power relations that teaches us that only some body minds our whole. 


healthy, well and deserving, that other body minds are expendable, disposable, less than human or not human, that that system of ableism wends its way through is necessary for and dependent upon every other form of oppression with which we contend. 


Ableism is the bedrock that undergirds settler colonialism and imperialism. It is the foundation for racialized capitalism. It is necessary for and deeply embedded within white supremacy and racism. It powers and it sustains queer antagonism and trans antagonism and misogyny. Disability, oppression or ableism is necessary for and arises out of every other form of oppression. 


oppression that we face, the violence of ableism at the individual level and at the systemic level represents and once its way through the violence of land of genocides, the sexual violence, the violence within the family, the violence of the academy, the violence of the medical system, the violence of our scientific research, the violence of the state, the violence of the empire and militarization. Ableism in a place. 


possible to understand without a deliberately intersectional analysis, without building intersectionally, without organizing intersectionally, and without analyzing intersectionally. Whether we are looking at history of the way in which ableism has always been used in this nation to justify the enslavement of Black Africans and their descendants, the ways in which ableist rhetorics and logic were used to justify and to further land theft and linguistic and cultural genocide of Native peoples' tribal nations, 


throughout the land that is currently labeled illegitimately as the United States. The ways in which ableism has always been used to justify the existence of immigration quotas, of determining which immigrants are valuable based upon perceived notions, racially and ableistly of wealth, of intelligence, of contribution. The ways in which ableism has always been used to justify mass criminalization and mass incarceration. The ways in which disability incarceration and incarceration cannot be 


separated or understood, separate or isolated from one another. The ways in which ableism justifies the ways in which children are dehumanized, the ways in which our elders are dehumanized, the ways that ableism justifies, pervades and upholds regime sexual terror and violence within the family, within partnerships, within society, and because of the state. The ways in which sexual violence and carceral violence are inseparable and deeply entangled. 


Ableism requires us to understand how it operates, but it does not want us to. Because Oppression works by rendering deliberately invisible its mechanics, by incentivizing us to think of it as individual so that we do not have a vision to work for or toward. Oppression wants us to think only about what we can do just to make the pain stop and not what we want after. 


oppression, if we have a better attitude, that if we get better grant, that we can form the correct coalitions and partnerships of institutions where power is concentrated, where the people who hold power remain wealth privileged, Christian, heterosexual, white, male, educated, Western, and from the global north, so that we can then attain some measure of however 


temporary or contingent respectability, some measure of approximation of power, of dominance, of normality, some measure of assimilation, all of what still gives us only the promise of conditional or potential personhood, then perhaps oppression and violence will lessen. It does not want us to think about the systems and the structures. 


that perpetuate and uphold its violence. It does not want us to think about the 80 to 90 % of developmentally disabled people who've been assaulted at least once in our lifetimes. 


Nor the fact that more than half of those that are designated female at birth, that's the way the statistics are collected. None of it is inclusive of or centering, let alone led by trans people. That the more than half of those who are designated female at birth will be sexually assaulted at least 18 times by the age of 18. That we are over, over the course of our lifetimes, at least seven times more likely to be assaulted than those who are not disabled. And that if we think about the intersections for those of us who are queer, 


who are trans, who are impoverished, who are immigrants or refugees from BIPOC communities in rural communities in the global South, living in occupied and living in colonized lands and territories that our communities likely face much higher rates of sexual violence at every turn. There are people in my community who I know who literally measure time based in increments of time since last assault. 


because that is the only way to think about time. Ableism does not want us to think about what it means to move past that, to understand the connections between carceral violence, medical violence, reproductive violence, colonial violence, and ableist violence. But disability justice asks us to think, what would it mean for us to build, sustain, and live in a world where we all receive care? Where violence prevention means changing and transforming our cultures,
in our societies. 


and prison systems that enact and perpetuate violence while protecting the perpetrator. 


Disability justice asked us to think what violence prevention means, what survivor -centric and survivor -led movements mean when so many perpetrators of violence, so many people who harm and so many people who abuse are also survivors. You see, disability justice is messy. Disability justice is hard, and yet it is also easy. Disability justice is a commitment to care and access. 


as radical praxis. Disability justice is an understanding that justice itself requires radical and active love. Disability justice is an offering that reminds us that if none of us are expendable or disposable, that all of our needs are valid and deserve to be met. That all of us are valuable and worthy, then that means all of us. What is the future we are building for?


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But just as ableism is a vehicle for white supremacy… disability justice is a vehicle for change. Disability rights looks at whether we are including people with disabilities in our services… while disability justice address the systemic and societal influences that lead to violence against people with disabilities. 


For folks who come from priveledge… learning about and striving to embody Disability Justice is terrifying… because it’s unfamiliar. There’s new terminology to learn… considerations and accommodations we’ve never had to think about before… there are glaring issues in our physical spaces… policies and practices that gatekeep people with disabilities from coming to the table that we need to address… and addressing them often costs us time… money… and a lot of uncomfortable moments. 


Learning disability justice and confronting our priveledge means we are going to make mistakes. And mistakes are scary… especially when we grow up in a professionalized work culture that demands we be perfect. 


But what is really cool about Disability Justice… is that it offers us a different way of doing things. Cierra and I got real about the fear of messing up… and where Disability Justice comes in. 


And I can imagine, you know, people probably think, or I have heard that people think it's too big. We can't go there. We can't, we don't have access to solve all of the things. So we're putting our hands up. And I've seen a real shift with that with disability justice. So can you talk to me about, 


for our listeners who might not know what disability justice is and how it comes into that as a vehicle for change. Absolutely. I love thinking about disability justice as a vehicle for change. So thank you for that lovely turn of phrase. I want to ask people to go to a piece by Sins Invalid called the 10 Principles of Disability Justice. And I really recommend that. It's a, it's 


easily digestible piece. And I want to recommend that to people so we can have and begin to have a shared understanding of what disability justice is. And this document is a great starting point. So I love the analysis of power and the emphasis on interdependence or power sharing that is inherent in the practices. 


and politics in the frameworks of disability justice. Because if the power is problem over, excuse me, if the problem is power over in interpersonal behavior and public policy, then a very powerful solution and antidote is power sharing and interdependence. And I think there are some limitations or huge tensions here because the public health approach to sexual violence, 


primary prevention was developed from the same combination of medical, legal, and scientific systems that create disability and usher in ableism. And we have to work within that paradigm. And so what does that look like to try to break the paradigm, the limitations, and maybe even the oppression of the public health approach? So I question what... 


are the limitations of being able to practice disability justice within that public health framework. Because like, for example, one of the principles of disability justice is the anti -capitalist politic and sexual violence primary prevention funding is politicized and nonprofit organizations that need funding and they need funding to do the great work that they do. So we're solidly within that 


capitalist paradigm. And so those are kind of the things I think about when I'm being pessimistic. And there are other exciting things happening in the field, like working to explore what mutual aid would look like in professional settings. Like, what does it look like when people or leaders from our member programs are fired, or they leave because of 


maybe anti -black racism. So we need to figure out what mutual aid is and to employ it with it or deploy mutual aid in our systems, both small and large. And so disability justice gives us mutual aid. It's about Mutual aid is about collaborative caregiving to meet the needs of an individual or a community. 


And so the way that I see this in the field is getting really innovative. This summer, I learned about a direct pay to youth program where they could provide no or low barrier access to cash for what youth needed. And I also get really excited about building leadership and decision -making power among neurodivergent people and people with disabilities who are practicing sexual violence primary prevention. 


And we need to make that an invitation. And we can do that by increasing representation of people with disabilities in our work and on our websites, on our walls, in print material, in our events, among our volunteers, and on our staff and boards. And when we engage in these practices, we end up with more intentional support for staff who are neurodivergent and disabled. And we increase accessibility. 


which is an invitation to staff and community to be here with us now to join us. And we make that possible. So the outcome of this is the development of institutional support to center the needs of communities that are most marginalized by ableist racist systems and structures and organizational practices. Pretty exciting stuff. 


It is pretty exciting stuff. So this is my invitation to you. It’s National Developmental Disabilities Month. While Disability Rights Organizations and self-advocates are out there fighting for a second of the spotlight… let March be an invitation to you to be a little more brave… and willing to fail… willing to learn. 


In part 2 of this podcast… we will look more at Disability Justice as a vehicle for change… and an underlying value to shift the way we operate as a movement. We’re also getting into some of those learning moments that come up when we get brave. 


We’re hearing more form Cierra and Lydia… as well as my colleague and friend at VALOR… Priscilla Klassen… who leads a training and technical assistance project in California - focused on improving care and access to folks with disabilities who have experienced sexual violence. 


What she has learned working with self-advocates in the disability community… and the kinds of fundamental shifts it takes to embody Disability Justice as an organizational value…all that and more in Disability Justice and Prevention Part 2: Reimagining our values. 


If you loved what you heard from Lydia and Cierra… you can find their original keynotes, NSAC sessions and interviews listed in the description of this podcast, and linked at prevent-connect-dot-org, along with all of the tools and resources you’ve heard mentioned in this episode.