Recently, I saw a new client who had an intellectual disability. Visiting his home, and seeing how he lived, gave me a stark reminder of all the ways in which vulnerable people can fall through the gaps in both societal and government support systems.
My client’s support worker had organised the appointment. I have quite a few clients with disabilities; most are physically disabled and make the arrangements themselves. The Australian government recently changed the rules around use of National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) funds so that they can no longer be used to pay for sexual services. There was a public outcry about this at the time which, while justified, was also a distraction from all the other cuts the government had made that would impact the lives of people with disabilities even more, such as a 50 per cent cut in travel subsidies. My clients who arrange to see me themselves have self-managed NDIS plans though, and so still have some autonomy in how they spend their funds. This client, because of his intellectual impairment, had his plan managed by a support worker who oversees the funds for several people with disabilities. Luckily, this particular plan manager was sympathetic to the needs of his clients, and when they expressed a desire for physical or sexual intimacy, he would discreetly funnel some of their funds towards that.
I had visited a number of his clients and they were always lovely—eager to see me—and lived in clean apartments. When I went to this man’s place, it was another story. It was a mess, with nothing but a few pieces of furniture and empty McDonald’s wrappers. The man was high on meth, and had an open, bleeding wound on his back that he hadn’t noticed. He was unable to call his plan manager because he had pawned his phone to buy the meth.
In spite of all that he was very sweet, and after I had pleasured him on his mattress (which he didn’t use to sleep in, preferring a blanket on the floor directly under the aircon unit, where it was cooler), I called his support worker to tell him that someone needed to be sent out ASAP to look at his back. I also said that a cleaner was needed too and explained what had happened to his phone. The support worker said he would stop by himself, was apologetic, and said that in this man’s case there were only enough funds for a cleaner once a week and a carer visit every three days. If this had been the only client of this support worker who I had seen, I might have worried he was embezzling funds. But as I had visited a number of the people whose circumstances he managed, and knew they lived well, I believed him about the inadequacy of the funding. I also have friends living on NDIS who themselves struggle to get by on the funding allocated to them.
This client told me that his family lived in another state and never visited him. The only contact and support he had was from people like me, who are paid to give it: evidence of both a failing in the system and in the community. All the people that had been in this man’s life from birth and through schooling had fallen away. Perhaps this was because he was too hard to deal with. But it is also definitely because of the way we view people with disabilities as disposable, and not our problem. This man had also been to jail for a few years in his late teens— an experience shared by quite a few of my clients with intellectual disabilities, and reflected in the fact that people with disabilities are overrepresented in the statistics about prison inmates globally. I imagine this experience of being a man with a disability who went through the carceral system will only have exacerbated his solitude, as he would be doubly stigmatised as an ex-convict.
The Australian government continuously cuts funding for people with disabilities, as does the British government and many others around the world. In Australia, the government tries to push people with disabilities into group homes to save money, even though this isn’t appropriate or safe for many people. Certainly, anyone sharing a residence with this client would have been exposed to both his squalor and drug use. This man—whose drug use I understand because what else is there for him to do in long days alone? —has been left isolated because his care plan doesn’t meet his needs, and helpless because the only way he can access money is by selling his possessions. It is an condemnation of our attitudes to people with disabilities, as well as of our government, that we have allowed the funding and support for them to be so undermined.
